10.10 and Intel 82801I ICH9 HD Audio

[SedaliaSteve]

I had a desktop system that was running the Jaunty alternate to desktop. (The alternate supports RAID 1.) Foolishly I upgraded to Lucid.

The real issue is my audio. I have the following:

*-multimedia
description: Audio device
product: 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 1b
bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0
version: 02
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=HDA Intel latency=0
resources: irq:44 memory:fdff8000-fdffbfff

Previously, alsa had no support for this. I'd removed every trace of also and used OSS which produced great sound. Now OSS is deprecated and alsa is even more heavily integrated. Removing it is an easy way to blow it up. I tried rolling to Meerkat to see if the support was better. It is marginally supported. I can get crappy analog video and no digital.

Has anybody made this work?

Steve

[SedaliaSteve]

I found a solution - unfortunately it is Arch Linux. I know this community is trying to make a Linux that can install right of the box. The problem is that it does this by leaving a large number of users hanging with no help. I simply cannot understand why OSS was deprecated and Alsa became the only choice. OSS has been supporting devices for years that Alsa still doesn't know about.

When I started searching this forum I found lots of threads about people left hanging since this chipset went into lots of laptops. After struggling with 10.04 and 10.10 it seemed the only way to stay with Ubuntu would have been to downgrade to 9.04 but downgrading doesn't seem to work easily, generally requiring a fresh install. It came down to falling back to an obsolete unsupported Ubuntu or go to Arch Linux. It was a pain but it works fine.

I still have a Dell Mini 9 with 9.10 and an antique laptop running Xubuntu. I'm going to be slow to upgrade if this can be expected.

All of this started by my misreading an ICH7 in the Alsa docs and forgetting mine was ICH9 and clicking on upgrade. Read manuals carefully!

Steve

[Shplad]

Hey Steve:

Thanks for your helpful posts about this subject. It was your posts that opened my eyes to the problems I've been having with my Shuttle SP35P2 Pro.

I was beginning to completely give up on getting the machine's sound chip working, when I came across your posts.

Would you please be good enough to share which version(s) of Arch you tried that worked out of the box with this sound chip?

I'm sort of a Linux newbie, though pretty technical in general with Windows and hardware. I just don't have the time right now to be doing a lot of trial and error with this Shuttle.


I'd be very grateful if you would. Thanks either way.

Shplad



I found a solution - unfortunately it is Arch Linux. I know this community is trying to make a Linux that can install right of the box. The problem is that it does this by leaving a large number of users hanging with no help. I simply cannot understand why OSS was deprecated and Alsa became the only choice. OSS has been supporting devices for years that Alsa still doesn't know about.

When I started searching this forum I found lots of threads about people left hanging since this chipset went into lots of laptops. After struggling with 10.04 and 10.10 it seemed the only way to stay with Ubuntu would have been to downgrade to 9.04 but downgrading doesn't seem to work easily, generally requiring a fresh install. It came down to falling back to an obsolete unsupported Ubuntu or go to Arch Linux. It was a pain but it works fine.

I still have a Dell Mini 9 with 9.10 and an antique laptop running Xubuntu. I'm going to be slow to upgrade if this can be expected.

All of this started by my misreading an ICH7 in the Alsa docs and forgetting mine was ICH9 and clicking on upgrade. Read manuals carefully!

Steve