Re: [tlug] further adventures in reinstalling ALSA from source

[scott <scott@example.com>]

Hi TLUG,

Well, after days of extensive googling, I've realized that recently a
lot of people are having problems with ALSA sound on their laptops,
especially ones with an intel-hda 82801G chip, regardless of distro. An
Ubuntu thread mentioned solving this by re-installing ALSA from source,
so I decided to hunker down and give it a shot. 

First I removed the existing alsa packages using rpm -e with nodeps,
then I downloaded the latest 2.6.24 kernel sources, compiled a new
kernel (that alone took some time because of missing dependencies like
ncurses, etc.). I hadn't compiled my own  kernel for a few years so it
was actually pretty fun- I like using the new make rpm function for
installing kernel headers. Anyway, after booting into the new kernel I
attempted to install alsa-driver-1.0.15. Running ./configure was fine,
but make crashed with a CFLAGS error. Checking the docs, alsa said it
supported only up to 2.6.22, so once again I downloaded, compiled and
booted from a new kernel (2.6.22) and this time was able to rebuild all
of the latest alsa packages from source. Unfortunately, alsamixer is
still not showing all of the faders necessary to resolve this problem-
it's identical to the previous version of alsamixer, missing the
headphon and front fader, so still no sound.

Talk about mendokusai. I know I shouldn't complain, after all it is free
software and I consider myself a pretty hardcore Linux fan/advocate, but
this lack of audio is making my workday pretty lame... Poor me, boo hoo.

Anyway, now that I know how to do it, I'm going to try to revert to an
older version of alsa that is working on a duplicate M500 laptop and see
what happens. Wish me luck..

Cheers,
Scott VanDusen
Tokyo