Mearse a goticas

Joeputa Vida! Que camello!

I recently bought a Toshiba Satellite (A205 S4577). It came with Windows Vista, and given that I'm a linux user (and a Microsoft hater) the first thing I did after unpacking was repartition the disk, obviously deleting Windows Vista.

Still I work with SAP. I'm what they call: "Technology Consultant SAP NetWeaver 2004s - Portal" (Recently Certified)... That means that when I bought the computer I still wasn't so, so I was studying hard to. The tool to study with is called JAVA SneakPreview and its license expires every 29 days. So I had to install a new Version of WinXP every month if I wanted to study a little bit more.

I did it twice, but monday, when I was about to do it for the third time the fucker didn't want to.

IT DIDN'T want to. I Inserted the WinXP disc and nothing happened. At first I thought it was the copy of Windows so I got a new one and tried. The same. I asked, asked and asked but nobody would say a word, much because they shouldn't have had a clue. The problem was very strange, I thought it was the DVD drive, but it wasn't since it was reading and writing perfectly. So I tried to install Vista with the restore DVD that came along with the laptop (which now on we'd refer to as 'the fucker') and it went perfectly.

I don't want to see my face when I realized that I wouldn't be able to install WinXP ever again due to a problem that still I ignore. If I called to Toshiba they'd simply say: "Your product is designed to work with Vista, we DON'T SUPPORT WinXP" and that was it.

But I didn't give up so I tried to install it one way and another. With no success by the way. I came up with the crazy idea of install it through qemu. My plan was this: Start qemu as a root and point the hda to the /dev/sda and the cdrom to my actual dvd /dev/cdrom. But the process hanged like before, so I used an image of the WinXP installation cd but got the same result. I, later, made a virtual disk and the thing worked leaving me no doubt about the cause of the error: the disk. Still Vista worked perfectly so I couldn't do nothing but come up with something.

Did I mention that the fucker plays no sound under any linux distro? If I didn't now I do as you can see in almost every forum.

But there is a solution for it.

Here I want to share it.

First, download and compile the lattest drives of alsa

create a directory with the name you want, I used alsa

# mkdir alsa
# rsync -avz --delete --exclude=.hg* rsync://alsa.alsa-project.org/hg alsa

Open alsa-driver

# ./hgcompile --with-cards=hda-intel --with-sequencer=yes
# make;make install

then alsa-lib

# ./hgcompile
#make;make install

Finally alsa-utils

# ./hgcompile
# make;make install

To the /etc/modules write:

lias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias snd-card-1 snd-cmipci

options snd-cmipci id="first" mpu_port=0x330

alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0


# OSS/Free portion - card #1
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

# OSS/Free portion - card #2 (cmipci)
alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1
alias sound-service-1-0 snd-mixer-oss

Then reboot the machine

IF YOU ARE LUCKY YOU SHOULD HAVE SOME SOUND NOW. Run alsaconf and follow directions. If alsaconf is not able to find your audio card, try this:

modprobe snd-hda-intel (provided that you compiled the kernel with that option as a module)

and run again alsaconf.

The whole thing took me like a day and a half to figure out so I was very excited when I hear sound.

Mearse a goticas: "Pee drop by drop" A expresion you use when someone's very excited for a given reason.