Sound on CP M233ST


Forum: Laptops
Topic: Sound on CP M233ST
started by: clivesay

Posted by clivesay on June 20 2008,03:27
Seems like this topic has been beat to death from other threads I've found but I just cannot seem to get sound on this darn laptop. According to specs it has the Crystal 4237B chip that I have read so much about. None of the modprobes I've done on it seem to work. I've also tried in a few other distros. Anyone have any secrets with this chip they can share with me?

Thanks,

Chris

Posted by chaostic on June 20 2008,07:15
http://www.acronymchile.com/alsa_help.html

< http://www.linuxquestions.org/questio....-442434 >

Also, post the output of "dmesg" "lsmod" and "lspci"

Posted by clivesay on June 21 2008,01:54
no mention of the sound in dmesg.

nothing in lsmod

no mention of it in lspci.

The guy who owns this laptop said he had sound in Red Hat 4.3. I guess I will install the alsa extensions, add bootcodes and get that part setup and see where we are at.

Thanks

Chris

Posted by Jason W on June 21 2008,15:17
Chris,
Did you have any luck with alsa and the snd_cs4236 driver?  I also saw this page that may be of some help, though it is not for the same laptop.

< http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/CS4237 >

Maybe it could be of help.

Posted by clivesay on June 25 2008,02:18
To bring this thread to resolution I will post the following.....

It appears the CS4237B sound chip can be a real bear as I've seen many many posts about this particular chipset with oss and alsa. For some they use the cs4236 module and for others, the cs4232 works. After much trial and error and banter with JasonW in IRC, I finally have this working in DSL.

First off, here is the solution for oss with a Dell CP M233ST laptop.

Code Sample
modprobe cs4232 io=0x530 irq=5 dma=0 dma2=0 mpuio=0x330 mpuirq=5 synthirq=1 synthio=-1


Add that info to bootlocal.sh if you want it to load at boot with a frugal install.

I probably would have never gotten this if it wasn't for the fact that the owner of this laptop had a Red Hat 4.3 install on this machine that had working sound. I have some old RH 6 cd's so I loaded it on the lappy and sure enough, sound! When I ran sndconfig, it gave a lot of detail around ports and set up the sound flawlessly. When I grabbed sndconfig from woody to run in DSL, it didn't give as much detail and failed to get sound working!!

So, I looked for the RH equivalent to modules.conf and searched for the sound info. That is where I found the code above. I plugged that into DSL and it came alive!

Very interesting that the same app, sndconfig, performed so much differently in RH as opposed to debian. Maybe it was a version issue. All I know is that the next time I have a real perplexing sound issue on an old machine, I'm gonna do a quick RH6 install!  :)

Thought I would share my journey. Hope it helps someone.

Chris

Posted by chaostic on June 25 2008,05:12
Found this with a google of "cs4237 io irq" (Also with "modprobe cs4237 io irq"

< http://www.levien.com/tp600.html >

Has the same exact string as yours. Maybe adding "io" and "irq" to any search string is a good thing to suggest from now on.

Also, what about the sndconfig from sarge?

Posted by clivesay on June 25 2008,10:45
Ah..I missed the oss string on that page. I had been trying to get the alsa to work. Thanks for the link. No idea about sndconfig in sarge. I may give that a try just to see how it works.

For now, just glad I have sound on this old thing. It actually has 128mb ram so it's running a frugal install very well.

Chris

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