NForce4 Board: Which way to sound?

[ScreamnAbdab]

Hope someone can clear things up for me. I need to know the correct way to get sound out of my board.

I have a Biostar TForce 6100-939 MB w/NForce410. The onboard sound chip is acually a REALtek ALC655.

So, which way do I go for sound? NVidia NForce Audio OSS driver, or Realtek's Alsa driver, or Alsa's Intel8x0 driver?

I have had a bit of luck with NVidia driver. "cat /dev/urandom >> /dev/audio" produces static. But that is as far as I get. So if NForce is the answer, could you please also provide info on how to "finalize" the setup.

Thanks!

[bjlockie]

Originally Posted by ScreamnAbdab

So, which way do I go for sound? NVidia NForce Audio OSS driver, or Realtek's Alsa driver, or Alsa's Intel8x0 driver?

I would go the ALSA Intel8x0 if you do not need the 5.1 output, otherwise use the NForce OSS driver.
I have no idea what the Realtek driver is.

[patmartini]

Originally Posted by bjlockie

I would go the ALSA Intel8x0 if you do not need the 5.1 output, otherwise use the NForce OSS driver.
I have no idea what the Realtek driver is.

Hello all. Could someone please give additional information on obtaining and installing the Intel 8x0 driver (Suse 10 / no network working)? Thank you. pm..

[rohanld]

Originally Posted by patmartini

Hello all. Could someone please give additional information on obtaining and installing the Intel 8x0 driver (Suse 10 / no network working)? Thank you. pm..

In case you have decided against 5.1 sound and are happy with four speakers & the sub woofer working I would recomend that you follow the steps as outlined in following URL. Once this is up you can always do some r&d and make the 5.1 work like a 5.1 with all features enabled.

http://alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ind...-Nvidia#matrix

There is only one driver for the NForce chipset regardles of nforce chipset version.

Follow the procedure as detailed exactly and you will have a working sound system. The NVIDIA Driver available for download is NOT Yet ALSA , it is still OSS. Kudows to Nvidia for atleast hinting in their documentation file that they are considering ALSA for the future.

This will atleast give you a multi threaded audio system so that you can watch a DVD Movie , play a MP3 and also listen to an AUDIO CD all at the same time. Use KDE or GNOME Sound Setup to ensure that ALSA is chosen.

Important :
Also ensure that you have the kernel sources installed on the machine for your kernel. Also ensure that minimum program devlopment tools and libraries like gcc etc are also loaded on the system as the configuration requires these tools to be available.

[nukem]

Funny you should metion Realtek, I was just at the ASUS site looking to see if I had the latest BIOS when I saw that ASUS released a Linux audio driver for my A8N-SLI Premium(nForce4 chipset), this driver as well as the win drivers are labeled as Realtek audio driver. Upon futher inspection of the driver download they have I noticed two things, first of all its just the alsa-driver package with a couple of how-tos to get it working and second of all while looking at the supplied modules.conf file it shows this

#--- Intel 8x0  , SiS 7012 and NVidia----------
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
options snd-intel8x0 index=0 id="ICH"

So I guess, according to ASUS the offical Linux dirver is the intel one.

[ScreamnAbdab]

Never did get alsa to work with this system. If anyone has this board (specifically, Biostar TForce 6100-939 MB w/NForce410) working with Alsa, please let me know with any details you can provide.

nvsound is working however, so I'm still happy with the board and nvidia. A nice driver update to alsa would be nice though.