[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#458010: Bug#458010: alsa-base: Alsa fails to find ES1988 soundcard, even though the kernel module snd_maestro3 is loaded.

[Elimar Riesebieter]

On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 the mental interface of
Aapo Lankinen told:

> 
> On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 22:02 +0100, Elimar Riesebieter wrote:
> > Did you managed to get sound? Let me kno whether the bug can be
> > closed or not. It seems to be not such important for you, though.
> 
> Yes, you guessed right; it wasn't that important to me as I'm not using
> the laptop for multimedia anyway.  Sorry about that.  But now I used an
> hour to test it for the benefit of other N600c users, 

Thanks ;)

> and by rebuilding
> the modules from the source package it worked like you suggested and I
> got sound:
> 
> -------clip-------
> alankine at weasel:~$ aplay -l
> **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
> card 0: PCI [ESS Allegro PCI], device 0: Allegro [Allegro]
>   Subdevices: 2/2
>   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
>   Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
> -------clap-------

Looks good.

> 
> However, I don't understand _why_ it worked, as the source and binary
> packages were of the same version.  Could you please give some insight
> on that...
> 
> -------clip-------
> alankine at weasel:~$ dpkg -l alsa-base alsa-source
> Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
> |
> Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
> |/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err:
> uppercase=bad)
> ||/ Name           Version        Description
> +++-==============-==============-============================================
> ii  alsa-base      1.0.15-3       ALSA driver configuration files
> ii  alsa-source    1.0.15-3       ALSA driver sources
> -------clap-------

The ALSA drivers are part of the kernel. Your kernel (2.6.23)
provides version 1.0.14. What we are doing is to serve the actual
ALSA drivers in the package aksa-source. Release candidates you can
find in experimental (this belongs to the whimsy of the maintainer
;)) 2.6.24 will provide 1.0.15, while I suspect to have the next
RC's at that time... I can't and won't verify why the 2.6.23 Debian
Kernel binary doesn't work with your card.

> 
> Also, I now have two versions of the maestro3 module under
> my /lib/modules/2.6.23-1-68/ dir, in
>   o /lib/modules/2.6.23-1-686/kernel/sound/pci/snd-maestro3.ko
>   o /lib/modules/2.6.23-1-686/updates/alsa/pci/snd-maestro3.ko
> (as well as two versions of other sound modules).  How does the system
> know to load the correct versions?  Is there some magic in the dirname
> "updates" or what?

Right, udev loads the drivers out of updates dir.

> 
> 
> In conclusion: Because the maestro3 module, kernel and alsa seem to work
> ok now, I'd presume that the only bug is in the binary package
> dependencies.  So my guess is that the 2.6.23 kernel package should
> depend on recompiled alsa modules (new binary package, perhaps?)  Is
> that correct?

No. As told before, the alsa divers are part of the kernel and the
Debian kernel maintainers don't patch the kernel for actual drivers.
The Debian kernel is only cleanded to follow DFSG (Debian Free
Software Guidelines) [0].

> 
> And finally, thanks for your help.

This is how open source seems to work ;)

[0] www.debian.org/social_contract

Bug closed ;)
Elimar


-- 
  Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, 
  not the fountainheads ;-)
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