Linux – Noise Ave.

Gentoo Problems with Sound – VMWare

A while ago I blogged about sound problem on Gentoo in VMWare. You can read about it here – Gentoo Problems with Sound.

As it turns out, it was an issue with the in-kernel sound driver for the soundcard that vmplayer emulates. If you’re using kernel 2.6.30-r6 or older, it should work fine. But if you update to a later kernel, it will plays the audio messed up. Solution? Well you could do:

Compile kernel without sound driver, then find the driver independently and use a version that works.
Rollback to 2.6.30-r6 or older.

For compiling kernel without sound driver, it will be a bit of work to find which driver it uses for emulated vmplayer soundcard. lspci on my vmplayer 3 reports:

00:12.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 02)

If you can find in the kernel the modules and disable it and then either find the driver binary for your distro or find the source, then you can roll back to a version that works. Keep in mind that it could be some kernel setting that is causing the audio to be played badly. Some realtime or clock settings.

For #2, most distros are on old kernels so it should be fine. By the time more distros move to the newer kernel, it could get fixed in the kernel or a better solution may be blogged about.

Until then, enjoy your linux distro.

Using Different Linux Distros

Have been using Slackware 13 lately. It’s pretty decent. Originally, I was using Kubuntu on this laptop and it required lot of reboots. Sometimes one reboot a day. It got to be so weird. But the KDE version on kubuntu was higher so it had some new knick knacks.

Then I decided to move to slackware on this laptop. Using KDE from the Slackware install. Slackware chooses stable packages and so the packages in Slackware repos are fairly old. As a result KDE doesn’t have KNetworkManager and all wifi stuff must be done using cli. It’s not so much of a problem but every now and then the scripts just start doing odd things and take a while to connect. You can use wicd on it for GUI. But it doesn’t rival KNetworkManager.

Overall Slackware is very much nicer that Kubuntu. The overall gui response is pretty nice.

Gentoo Problems with Sound

Gentoo is just being childish.

Installed Gentoo using VMware in different VMs. Total 4 installation. In 1 sound worked fine. In other 3 the sound works weird. It plays very fast. Plays the whole song in 10-15 seconds.

Have debugged the issue but haven’t been able to fix it.

Sunday Haps

It’s been a while since my last update. I have been busy working on some stock stuff lately. I have also been working on some music stuff. Writing, composing, recording. And also on listening other people’s music.

Worked on my gentoo setup. Got my DE setup correctly. Well it’s not really a DE. Working on getting ACPI stuff fixed on the laptop so the lid can just be shut down. Currently the hibernate-ram commands works fine putting the computer to Sleep (suspend to RAM). But when waking it up, it doesn’t seem to wake up. I’m not sure if it’s a kernel thing or a module thing. I have all the modules installed based on the documentation, but it still doesn’t work. Will keep working on it.

Slow Sunday. Waiting to go to church in a little bit.