[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: loadlin



Stanislav Malyshev a.k.a Frodo wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, David Resnick wrote:
> 
> > I was trying to use isapnptools, the problem is that it couldn't detect
> > my soundcard. If the device isn't found by the utility, the docs say to
> > do a loadlin boot from DOS after the soundcard has been initialized.
> >
> > I've done a bit more research, and it seems that my soundcard (Ensonic
> > AudioPCI) is not supported by the 2.0.x kernel. That's OK, though. It
> 
> Just a moment. isapnptools is for ISA devices, not? And yours is PCI?
> You might also try to look on OSS. It has a good record of supported
> devices. http://www.4fronttech.com/ IIRC.
> 
> --
> frodo@sharat.co.il      \/  There shall be counsels taken
> Stanislav Malyshev      /\  Stronger than Morgul-spells
> phone +972-2-6245112    /\              JRRT LotR.
> http://sharat.co.il/frodo/      whois:!SM8333
There is a driver! I use this card with kernel 2.0.36.
The driver's name is es1371 (after its chip's name), it's under
the experimental sound drivers.

As frodo mentioned, isapnp is not needed for this card since it's PCI
and not ISA.

Note that the card has no hardware MIDI playing suport and most
wave playing programs won't work because of different wave output
format.
Mp3 playing will work out of the box since mp3 players don't use
the old format.

here is /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/es1371 :

ALaw/uLaw sample formats
------------------------

This driver does not support the ALaw/uLaw sample formats.
ALaw is the default mode when opening a sound device
using OSS/Free. The reason for the lack of support is
that the hardware does not support these formats, and adding
conversion routines to the kernel would lead to very ugly
code in the presence of the mmap interface to the driver.
And since xquake uses mmap, mmap is considered important :-)
and no sane application uses ALaw/uLaw these days anyway.
In short, playing a Sun .au file as follows:

cat my_file.au > /dev/dsp

does not work. Instead, you may use the play script from
Chris Bagwell's sox-12.14 package (available from the URL
below) to play many different audio file formats.
The script automatically determines the audio format
and does do audio conversions if necessary.
http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/projects.html


Blocking vs. nonblocking IO
---------------------------

Unlike OSS/Free this driver honours the O_NONBLOCK file flag
not only during open, but also during read and write.
This is an effort to make the sound driver interface more
regular. Timidity has problems with this; a patch
is available from http://www.ife.ee.ethz.ch/~sailer/linux/pciaudio.html.
(Timidity patched will also run on OSS/Free).


MIDI UART
---------

The driver supports a simple MIDI UART interface, with
no ioctl's supported.


MIDI synthesizer
----------------

This soundcard does not have any hardware MIDI synthesizer;
MIDI synthesis has to be done in software. To allow this
the driver/soundcard supports two PCM (/dev/dsp) interfaces.

There is a freely available software package that allows
MIDI file playback on this soundcard called Timidity.
See http://www.cgs.fi/~tt/timidity/.



Thomas Sailer
sailer@ife.ee.ethz.ch

-- 
 _____        _
|____ \      | |   Gili Granot
 __  \ \     | |
|_ \  \ \    | |   e-mail:    gil@cs.technion.ac.il
 _\ \__\ \___| |
|______________|