Another Breakthrough !! Sound and Wireless Networking (Now Working !!)

on IBM Lenovo 3000 N100 with BOSS 2.0 i.e debian lenny/sid (debian testing/unstable, kernel 2.6.21-1-486, gnome 2.18)

Although I've tried my hands-on with various Debian derivatives this one actually made me WORK !!

For Sound, apparently problem was with Alsa Drivers (1.0.14) that wasn't able to make Sound Card (Intel Corporation) work. At first instance whenever system was up some process was holding /dev/dsp i.e audio device used to get blocked by some process (since it was throwing error "can't access /dev/dsp" whenever I tried to use festival TTS for sound test). Then I tried with the most popular "patched alsa" from here .

But didn't work :-(

Eventhough the module ("high definition audio" module: snd-hda-intel) is loaded, the laptop produces no sound (known for kernel 2.6.21 and 2.6.22)

Seems to be known kernel/alsa-source bugs (#431314 & #431775). But there's a workaround :-)

Building Alsa-Module

Below is a small script to patch & compile Alsa. It downloads latest alsa-source (ALSA driver sources) from lenny/sid (my OS had debian's testing/unstable repositories), apply small patches to it then shell script (t61-build-alsa-module.sh) builds the alsa module with these three patches. This script does it so easily :-)

Shell Script : t61-build-alsa-module.sh

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#/bin/sh
# Small script to download,patch,build the alsa module for Thinkpad T61/R61/X61.
# t61-build-alsa-module.sh v0.4 (C) Franklin Piat 2007. released under GPL.
# thanks to
# Alsa teams
# http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/AD1984
#  http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions//showthread.php?s=0b8d3760255e43abaecdfc8e0e4cba12&t=564079&page=3
#
m-a prepare || exit
m-a clean alsa || exit
m-a get alsa-source || exit
m-a unpack alsa || exit
cd /usr/src/modules/alsa-driver/alsa-kernel/ || exit
## kernel alsa 1.0.14 don't need the first three patch
case "$(cat ../version)" in
1.0.13*)
wget -O - http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel/raw-diff/ed48e4edc677/pci/hda/patch_analog.c | patch -p1 || exit
wget -O - http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel/raw-diff/45179b325c8e/pci/hda/patch_analog.c | patch -p1 || exit
wget -O - http://www.klabs.be/~fpiat/linux/debian/Etch_on_Thinkpad_T61/t61-alsa-1.0.13-backport-patch.diff | patch -p1 || exit
;;
esac
wget -O - http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel/raw-diff/958b39f3e8dd/pci/hda/patch_analog.c | patch -p1 || exit
wget -O - http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel/raw-diff/47ca87407c84/pci/hda/patch_analog.c | patch -p1 || exit
wget -O - http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel/raw-diff/ca37aeeeb0ea/pci/hda/patch_analog.c | patch -p1 || exit
m-a --not-unpack build alsa || exit
#Install with : dpkg -i /usr/src/alsa-modules-$(uname -r)_1.0.14-1+$(uname -r).deb
#You might have to enable "speaker" (in the gnome mixer's "switch" tab ; Or in "alsamixer").
#You might need to add "options snd-hda-intel model=thinkpad/lenovo" at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

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Of course there are three things at the last of the script that needs to be done manually (might need) !

Now DONE with Sound, it's working out-of-the-box :-)


Wireless Networking (Not Working) !!

Intel's wireless driver not seems to be included in the debian yet :-(

Following packages solved the issue (apt-get install)

firmware-ipw3945
ipw3945d
ipw3945-source
madwifi-tools
wireless-tools
kernel-package (for make-kpkg)
ipw3945-modules-2.6.21-1-486 (depends on kernel version)
fakeroot
ipw3945-modules

/etc/apt/sources.list had following repositories;

deb http://packages.bosslinux.in/boss anant main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib

After rebooting the machine again check if /dev/dsp gets blocked by some process (run `/bin/fuser -v /dev/dsp` through console), if so kill the particular process to make audio device free. Then go for any multimedia player.

At last after spending almost half day I could make Sound and Wireless Networking (Now Working ;-) ) on Lenovo 3000 N100 with BOSS 2.0 (debian testing, kernel 2.6.21-1-486, gnome 2.18) :-)