Arch Linux

stabu

Member

Registered: 2010-01-14

Posts: 19

brick walls on sound and X/KMS

<more of a rant, than a request for help>

10 days later and sadly I'm hitting bricks walls with Arch on my Aspire One D150. Sound and X are the problems.

In the beginning I have to say I was delighted with the documentation, but I'm finding reading them from start to finish just isn't working in terms of sorting my problems.

1) Sound ... the wiki article is quite long and seemingly comprehensive, but it concentrates too much on the specific configuration of the main writer.
Sound is hairy in linux, there's always a bunch of different modules I have an Intel HDA and actually found the article of little use. OK, it has some good commands to issue but how to analyse them for my own configuration, well I don't know.

My own problem is that I cannot get any sort of a mixer coming up. I pacman'd alsa-{tools,lib.firmware} but nothing. Maybe alsamixer is a frontend to amixer (I surmise) but I can't get any package for amixer off pacman.

The problem with manually editting the modprobe.conf file is that I have to know _exactly_ how the module is labelled. The commands offered in the wiki give a _general_ idea but how to get from the general to the specific is left as an exercise. There are so many soudn mduels anyway, how to know which one should be mentioned in modprobe.conf?

So despite spending a good deal of time there, no decent sound.

2) The ten days have mostly been devoted to getting X going. No luck. I admit I fancied this KMS deal in the beginning so I went for it. Once again I stuck to the wiki, pacman'd all the xf86 packages (evdev, etc) then used mkinitcpio appemnded i915 modeset=1 onto kernel boot options, installed awesome .. created rc.lua in .config set up .xinitrc., quite a lot of things, but nothign came good. startx fails with fbcon failing (although from my reading little can be gaine by trying to trace fbcon down). I know X isn't a perfect package, but when its errors say: "screen found" and then "no screen found" well you know you are in for the long haul.

In short, I'm thinking of bailing out ... going back to slackware, as soon as I can sort out how to get the 150 to boot off a slackware USB ....

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((marry*)(char* _hername_, char* _myname_)) = (hell<0º)? 1:0;

FrozenFox

Member

From: College Station, TX

Registered: 2008-03-23

Posts: 422

Website

Re: brick walls on sound and X/KMS

Sorry to hear you're having so much trouble.

This will then be more of an informational counter-comment than an attempt at helping ;P

If you feel you can improve the alsa wiki page, there is a discussion section on it. I suggest you post your comment there with specific ideas, and perhaps if people agree we can improve it accordingly. The documentation is open for all to revise (it isn't run entirely by devs like some docs), no way to make it better without input and actually working on it -- both discussion and literally adding to it.

Might I recommend installing kernel 2.6.31, as far as your KMS problems go? My laptop (inspiron 700m) just wouldn't work with intel drivers on the current kernel (2.6.32 OR git 2.6.33) for whatever reason with similar errors (if I ever got it past the kernel init part..), so its worth a shot since it only takes a few minutes. I had a link for the bug report about that problem in the kernel at some point, but I can't be bothered looking for it right now. The vesa drivers however "just worked" if i removed the intel ones iirc (naturally with KMS disabled and removed from the init process). Recall that Arch patches stuff very minimally or ideally not at all, so if the packages here give you trouble, eventually I imagine the same things will bug you on Slack. That said, I've not used slack much. If this works for you, blocking the package from being upgraded is quite easy in /etc/pacman.conf with IgnorePkg.

On a 32 bit machine,

pacman -U http://www.schlunix.org/archlinux/core/os/i686/kernel26-2.6.31.6-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz

You may want/need to also grab kernel-headers/kernel26-headers and kernel26-firmware from the same place, http://www.schlunix.org/archlinux/core/os/i686/ , which keeps old versions of packages for such situations. I think I used firmware 2.6.31-1 and headers 2.6.31.5-1. Also of course if you're on 64 bit, change the URL accordingly to x86_64 and you may need to remove/replace packages manually (like dealing with linux-api-headers which I think replaced kernel26-headers?), but iirc downgrading "just worked". I figured it was possibly something I had done wrong and didn't have time/patience to find out, so I've not added it to the wiki in the hopes that the next kernel26 will fix it (else, I may just do that).

As for your sound issue.. I don't know, but I don't have the time/patience to go looking up information for that laptop atm though I may do so later today. I recall when I needed to manually do something like that, I used the information from the sound area in /proc to find the card number, then googled from there.

On that note, does hal seem to start up properly? I'm assuming so unless you made your own xorg.conf, else nothing would work, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Please also check pacman -Ql alsa-utils and be sure alsamixer is at least showing up in the package files list. It should be part of alsa-utils iirc, and pacman should show it as an installed file. You could check the path of the file thereafter to see if it actually exists, which may or may not be /usr/bin/alsamixer. I don't think alsamixer itself is a link to something else. It's entirely possible it just didn't copy over properly for some reason, or installed to some borked partition or disk sector. I'm not sure what you mean by being unable to open alsamixer -- that it doesn't seem to exist or errors out (silently or verbose), but I'm assuming the former from your post.

Sorry for the essay, btw

Last edited by FrozenFox (2010-02-10 12:05:33)

stabu

Member

Registered: 2010-01-14

Posts: 19

Re: brick walls on sound and X/KMS

Many, many thanks for your answer .. you really took alot of trouble in your consideration ...

but I don't have the time/patience to go looking up information for that laptop atm though I may do so later today

Please don't! You've given me plenty of pointers .. more than enough, cos you've also motivated me.

Thanks very much!!!

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((marry*)(char* _hername_, char* _myname_)) = (hell<0º)? 1:0;

stabu

Member

Registered: 2010-01-14

Posts: 19

Re: brick walls on sound and X/KMS

unfortunately the schlunix kernel was registered as corrupted. I'm afraid I'm throwing in the towel in terms of Arch linux, and going back to Slackware.

I originally came here because the impression I received was that Arch was almost like Slackware except with the package management. I have no doubt that it's an excellent distro ... some of the docs are great, it's just that with many years using slack, and indeed being fed up with some of the very manual tasks, it looks as if I prefer to do things manually now, and not being able to immediately understand this package corruption business pretty much buried me. Oh, I'm sure i can understand if I took the time to read, but I suppose I don't want to spare that time. I'm just not an automatic package management type user.

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((marry*)(char* _hername_, char* _myname_)) = (hell<0º)? 1:0;