sound on Compaq Presario (and kernel question)

[Anna Davour]

Trying to get the sound to work on my Compaq Presario M2000. With version 
5.4 everything worked fine except sound and ACPI. After looking at 
http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/ I had the impression that I could get 
the sound to work by applying the provided patch, but that it should work 
without extra tricks if I upgraded to version 6 of the kernel. Well, I 
didn't succeed with the patch, but since I didn't think sound so important 
I let it be for the moment.

Later I decided to upgrade anyway, and now I return to the sound problem.

Now uname -a gives:

FreeBSD possession 6.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE #0: Thu Mar  9 
20:27:08 CET 2006     granntyckt at possession:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/KERNEL2 
i386

Here I must ask what PRERELEASE actually means. It's not in the handbook 
as far as I can see.

This is the message I get when starting KDE, unchanged since before the 
kernel upgrade:

Sound server informational message:
Error while initializing the sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (No such file or directory)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device.

When I do kldload snd_driver the following message appears on the console:

pcm0: <ATI IXP 400> mem 0xc0003400-0xc00034ff irq 17 at device 20.5 on pci0
pcm0: WARNING: timeout during codec detection; codecs might be present but 
haven't interrupted

What does this mean? It seems to find the right module, but it still 
doesn't work and I don't understand the message. Now, according to 
instructions I also run the following:

possession# pciconf -lv | grep -B 4 audio
     subclass = PCI-PCI
pcm0 at pci0:20:5: class=0x040100 card=0x3091103c chip=0x43701002 rev=0x02 
hdr=0x00
     vendor   = 'ATI Technologies Inc'
     class    = multimedia
     subclass = audio
possession# sysctl hw.snd.verbose=2
hw.snd.verbose: 1 -> 2
possession# cat /dev/sndstat
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
possession# sysctl hw.snd
hw.snd.report_soft_formats: 1
hw.snd.targetirqrate: 32
hw.snd.verbose: 2
hw.snd.maxautovchans: 0
hw.snd.unit: 0
possession# /usr/sbin/mixer
mixer: /dev/mixer: No such file or directory


And by the way I got another problem as well. After upgrading the kernel I 
had a strange crash where the screen turned white (actually grey with some 
vague patterns) and I could do nothing except turning off the power. Could 
not contact the computer from outside, it was really dead. It only 
happened once, but I would like to know why -- or if anyone else has seen 
a similar behaviour.

Lots of questionmarks here. I will greatly appreciate to get some of them 
straightened out.

/wokka
-- 
Doktorand, Institutionen för kärn- och partikelfysik
Uppsala universitet
http://www3.tsl.uu.se/~akesson/