Please provide utility for non-PNP ISA audio devices to be useful by default (was: ES1866/ES1878/ES1879 (non-PnP ISA) sound chipsets are not activated on boot by default)

Report retitled. There have been discussions on various lists (see pkg-alsa-devel on alioth and ubuntu-devel, for instance) stating the possibility that alsaconf will be removed altogether from Debian's packages. There has also been discussion to readd alsaconf into Ubuntu's alsa-utils package, but since alsaconf is poorly maintained (at best), this consideration is, at best, hackish. Since the aforementioned sound chipsets are not PnP, there does not exist a straightforward manner in which to activate the hardware on boot. Using alsaconf, while less than ideal, _could_ resolve this issue for such chipsets.

Audio team: now that the issue with modprobe.conf has been fixed (double fixed: bug #8134 and bug #8832), we have the option of reinstating alsaconf if it is appropriate.

The reporter of this bug seems to claim that it would allow these cards to work out of the box, which does not match my understanding (alsaconf must be run interactively); however, it is still useful to users with non-PNP ISA cards, for which there is little, if any, hope of configuring them automatically.

What do you think?

Historiadores acreditam que,
em Terça 11 Abril 2006 18:22, Matt Zimmerman disse:
> The reporter of this bug seems to claim that it would allow these cards to
> work out of the box, which does not match my understanding

Ouch!

Just to be fair, that's not what I said.
Alsaconf really is not a tool to automagically configure those cards.

But is is indeed very useful to (try to) detect what kind of card the system
has, what are the files that need to be edited by the user and what the user
has to write on those files.

As suggested, alsaconf could be tweaked to (or replaced by a different tool
with the same name) not alter the modules, modules.conf and modprobe.d files,
and just spit "you have to do this and this to get yours soundcard working -
remember you have a very old and unsupported hardware, so you are on your
own" on the user screen.

The "same name" issue is just for historical reasons (people KNOW there is
something called alsaconf that do the trick). But we could put some message
(in red color?) informing something like "if your sound is working, you DON'T
have to run this tool" or "this tool is meant to help you configure very old
ISA sound cards" or something more elaborate.

Also, there should be some rework to actually disable all the PCI and ISA-PnP
detection of the current alsaconf and just leave it with the "brute force"
non-PnP routines.

I agree users must be discouraged to use alsaconf. It's just that, for the
sole purpose of configuring a very old non-PnP ISA sound card, it is still
very useful and the only tool around.

Again, sorry for my bad english. If I did sound a little harsh that was not my
intention.

As for non-PnP ISA sound cards to be unsupported, well, thel that to my old
faithfull Armada...

Keep the good work guys!
--
Henrique Cesar Ulbrich
<email address hidden>

On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 10:21:03PM -0300, Henrique wrote:
> Historiadores acreditam que,
> em Terça 11 Abril 2006 18:22, Matt Zimmerman disse:
> > The reporter of this bug seems to claim that it would allow these cards to
> > work out of the box, which does not match my understanding
>
> Ouch!
>
> Just to be fair, that's not what I said.
> Alsaconf really is not a tool to automagically configure those cards.

You said that when you used the package from Debian testing, "it worked."
You left out the step where you manually configured the card using alsaconf.
:-)

> I agree users must be discouraged to use alsaconf. It's just that, for the
> sole purpose of configuring a very old non-PnP ISA sound card, it is still
> very useful and the only tool around.

I would be much happier with it if it did only this job, or otherwise
encouraged users to report bugs in cases where sound *can* work
automagically but doesn't (yet).

--
 - mdz

audio team is subscribed already, clearing assignee

Can we just patch alsaconf to issue a warning like "alsaconf is unmaintained, incompatible with other configuration tools, and fattening. Use at your own risk." I count myself among the users who find alsaconf useful. I'd feel differently if we had problems building it (it's a bash script) or if its mere presence on the system were likely to cause problems, but it's only going to be run by people who know to look for it in the first place, so I'd like to reiterate my opinion that it should be included until its functionality has been replaced.

Matt Zimmerman [2006-04-11 21:22 -0000]:
> Audio team: now that the issue with modprobe.conf has been fixed
> (double fixed: bug #8134 and bug #8832), we have the option of
> reinstating alsaconf if it is appropriate.

I never used it myself, but since it's apparently useful/necessary for
some people, I don't have a problem with including it again. I like
Rocco's proposal of adding that warning, though. :)

Has there been any thought of writing a utility just to handle these non-pnp ISA cards, using some of the code from alsaconf as a base?

I just so happen to have a box at home with ISA slots, and could quite easily have a look for, and pick up, a non-PNP ISA sound card, for testing. I would also be happy to write such a utility, using the ISA code from alsaconf as a base.

Thoughts?

Hi,

I'll be happy to help with writing the utility, but I don't have any
working machines with ISA anymore.

On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 12:25 +0000, Luke Yelavich wrote:
> Has there been any thought of writing a utility just to handle these
> non-pnp ISA cards, using some of the code from alsaconf as a base?
>
> I just so happen to have a box at home with ISA slots, and could quite
> easily have a look for, and pick up, a non-PNP ISA sound card, for
> testing. I would also be happy to write such a utility, using the ISA
> code from alsaconf as a base.
>
> Thoughts?
>