Linux and audio Here is what a Linux user is up against

Shuttle SN25P Sound

I just bought a new machine a few days ago and lo and behold, the sound isn't supported yet. It's the onboard sound chip from a shuttle FN25 board in the SN25P chbuttis (nforce4, socket 939). Or, at least not out of the box in ubuntu hoary. The driver that this thing uses is the 'ice1724' module.

Here's how I got it to work...

1st off, when I would modprobe the default kernel module, I'd receive these messages in the kernel ring buffer (dmesg):

ice1724: Invalid EEPROM (size = 255) ICE1724: probe of 0000:05:06.0 failed with error -5

Hmm... not good... It has to be something retarded like a PCI Product-Vendor ID. I did a quick google search and found this thread on groups. It explains just what I thought. The Subvendor PCI-ID is different from what was expected. I guess it's a new chip, that or shuttle changed it.

Anyways, I was able to get the sub-vendor ID from lspci...

0000:05:06.0 0401: 1412:1724 (rev 01) Subsystem: 1297:5036 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 18 I-O ports at a000 size=32 I-O ports at a400 size=128 Capabilities: 80 Power Management version 1 00: 12 14 24 17 05 00 10 02 01 00 01 04 00 20 00 00 10: 01 a0 00 00 01 a4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 20: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 97 12 36 50 30: 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0c 01 00 00

Pay attention to the 5 bytes starting at offset 2b. These 5 bytes are the subvendor ID for this card.

Get a copy of the kernel source, preferably from your distribution and edit:

sound-pci-ice1712-vt1720mobo.h

#define VT1720SUBDEVICEZNF3150 0x0f2745f6

to:

#define VT1720SUBDEVICEZNF3150 0x97123650

Make sure that the hex string matches the bytes you looked at earlier. Recompile the module and load it into the running kernel. Viola (I hate you peter), you should have sound.

Here's a patch against 2.6.11 that I made:

23:32:59.000000000 -0500 23:33:48.000000000 -0500 .eepromsize = sizeof(k8x800eeprom), .eepromdata = k8x800eeprom, }, + { + .subvendor = VT1720SUBDEVICEFN25NF4, + .name = "Shuttle FN25 Envy24PT-HT", +* This chip is also identical to the k8x800 *+ .chipinit = k8x800init, + .buildcontrols = k8x800addcontrols, + .eepromsize = sizeof(k8x800eeprom), + .eepromdata = k8x800eeprom, + }, { }* terminator *};

23:32:59.000000000 -0500 23:33:50.000000000 -0500 #define VT1720SUBDEVICEK8X800 0xf217052c #define VT1720SUBDEVICEZNF3150 0x0f2745f6 #define VT1720SUBDEVICEZNF3250 0x0f2745f6 +#define VT1720SUBDEVICEFN25NF4 0x97123650

extern struct sndice1712cardinfo sndvt1720mobocards; And this is typical for Linux.

What a joke, what a waste of time and what a collection of poorly programmed junk.

Linux may be ready for a server in a lights out data center but to expect desktop users to go through the above kind of crap in order to make sound, BASIC SOUND, work is insane.

And lest you think Linux is unfriendly just to audio, you can find many similar experiences with: Printers Video Cards. Scanners. USB devices RAID controllers. Firewire ports

and so forth.....

Just try and get dual displays working with Linux. Sure hope you know how to use vi because you will be dead without it unless you are an emacs expert in which case you and linux are a perfect pair.

Linux is a hostile,buggy, alpha quality unfriendly system that is best suited to people who are willing to choose their hardware to work and are willing to compile their own kernals and write their own drivers if need be.

Ira Wexler