Snd-powermac, And How To Get It Working (imho)

I'm a new user of suse 10.3 (3 days at time of writing this) on a vintage G4 laptop. It installed very smoothly, and i have to say, it's excellent to use as an os in general. I'm a composer, and i wanted to revive the old laptop for travelling to work in other places. The sound doesn't need to be sparkling, but it needs to work.

So, the only fly in the ointment, apart from the inevitable ati related vid challenges, was sound. There's plenty of documentation on the interlink, with plenty of associated anguish over the Alsa snd-powermac module, and it's truculent refusal to work with .20 kernels. This, i must add is for older g4's and earlier. The later versions use aoa.

But there is a solution.
The latest Alsa release, 1.016, contains a patched snd-powermac, and it works.

I installed this from source, and with 10.3 ppc, it installed without a hitch, with the condition that the module 'aoa' ISN'T installed. (This clashes with snd-powermac trying to get hold of the i2bus.) All the usual provisos with installing Alsa from source apply, the most important being to make sure you D/Land install the kernel source package for your kernel.

Once it's installed, and you've rebooted, and made sure you've got soundcore working (modinfo soundcore), you'll then have to load the modules with modprobe. (modprobe snd-powermac snd-usb-audio snd-virmidi snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm-oss snd-seq-oss snd-seq) are mine, just as an example.

Here's the important bit.

When you go to etc/sysconfig in Yast, you can add modules on the line: 'MODULES_LOADED_ON BOOT..'
This adds you rmodules just fine, but doesn't seem to last across boots.

Open a terminal, su to root, and then: edit /etc/sysconfig
The file will open for editing. Navigate down to MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="", and between the quotation marks, you should see the modules you've selected. If that's ok, then look down a couple of lines in the same section, and you'll see 'Default=""'

Make sure you MANUALLY ENTER your modules in this line too, between the quotation marks, with a single blank space between modules if you insert more than one.

(then press esc, and then type ":wq" (without quotations) to save the changes.)

Reboot, and enjoy sound without having to manually modprobe after each reboot.

The latest version of Alsa, and all the associated tools and libs can be d/l directly from them, and installs from source with the usual ./configure, make, sudo make installcommands. There is a note in the changelog specifically related to the patching of the snd-powermac module.

when you've installed the kernel sources, and get to the start of the alsa install (cd to the alsa directory you D/L), in your root terminal type: "./configure --help" (without quotations) and it will list all the card modules currently available in alsa.
So your root terminal line, using a couple of my modules would be something like: "./configure --with-cards=powermac,virmidi,usb-audio" (without quotations) This will install only the cards you need. Make sure you only put a comma between modules, and not a space as well, and don't add "snd" to the modules listed, as you might be tempted to do with the assumption that you use snd for modprobe. Use the module names strictly as presented.

If you want to use midi, make sure you load the relavent midi module for your card as well.

Finally, i'm no expert with this stuff, and a very new suse user. If i can do this there's hope for all.



p.s. I'm an old fashioned Jack and Alsa user, and i've refused to install pulseaudio on any of my linux boxes. So if there's added complications with PA and the Alsa install, then i'm sorry, but i can't help you.


Alex.

Edit: Anyone know where i can find a 10.3 RT kernel for PPC?