Audio on Ultra 60

[Jim Farrand]

Hi,

I'm trying to get sound out of my Sun Ultra 60 running Debian stable and
kernel 2.6.14.6.

At the moment, I can see mixers, programs think that they can play
sound, and I do get a nasty distorted noise out of the box, but it
doesn't bear much resemblence to the noise I think should be coming out.
I suspect that the output is being played too fast - if I play a tune in
xmms I can see the track time display moving far too fast
- a 3minute track zooms past in 30seconds or so (but I get exactly the
same distorted output in all players, including alsaplay).

I'm using the snd_sun_cs4231 driver.  According to this page:
http://www.dementia.org/~shadow/sparcaudio.html
this is the correct chipset for Ultra 60s.  Does anyone know if this
page is still relevant?  It's a bit light on instructions - says that
things should "just work" with recent kernels.  It doesn't mention what
kernel modules to load.  This is what I have:

[0]nyx:~# lsmod | grep snd
snd_sun_cs4231 28750  0
snd_pcm_oss66030  0
snd_mixer_oss  22996  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm   111473  2 snd_sun_cs4231,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer  32562  2 snd_sun_cs4231,snd_pcm
snd67204  5
snd_sun_cs4231,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore  14374  1 snd
snd_page_alloc 14945  2 snd_sun_cs4231,snd_pcm

Many pages mention audioctl and /dev/audioctl.  I've found this program,
but I don't seem to have this device node in /dev.  Is this because I am
missing a kernel module?  I suspect that if I had the right module, this
file would be created (like all the other files in /dev are these days).
I've tried mknodding this device with the appropriate numbers anyway,
but the audioctl program still fails with the error:

/dev/audioctl: No such device

The reason I want to use audioctl is that the only page I could find
with a vaguely similar sounding problem (wrt distorted output) suggested
using audioctl to set play.pause to 0.

Anyone have any suggestions?  Am I even on the right track trying to fix
/dev/audioctl or is that old news?

Regards,
Jim


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Re: RAID config option missing

[Jim Farrand]

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 11:07:06AM +0100, Arnaud Fontaine wrote:

> Actually, it seems to be a bug in parted, so partman isn't able to tag a
> partition as "Linux  RAID autodetect" (0xFD). Please take  a look at the
> bug #355467  [0]. At the moment there  is no solution in  order to solve
> this issue. However, Sebastien's HOWTO is really interesting ;).

Hi Arnaud,

I had fun with Sebastien's HOWTO.. I knew that French they taught me in
school would come in useful one day! :) In the end I got RAID working
very nicely on my Ultra 60.

I may get some bigger harddisks for that box soon, in which case I'll be
going through the process again.  If so I'll try and do English
translation of Sebastien's instructions.

Regards,
Jim

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Jim Farrand


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RAID config option missing

[Jim Farrand]

Hi,

I'm trying to install Debian on a Sun Ultra 60 with 2 SCSI harddisks.  I
want to use software RAID on the discs.

Although I can see the config option in partitioning section for
configering RAID, I am not able to set partitions to type "Physical
volume for RAID" in the partition config (which is a pre-requisite to
the Configuring RAID step).  All the guides I can find tell me I really
need to be able to set this option to do the install (although they are
all x86 specific).

Does anyone know if this is just a bug in the installer, or is there a
good reason that this option is missing (ie RAID won't work on this
setup)?  Or do I need to do something different on sparc systems?

Thanks in advance,
Jim

-- 
Jim Farrand


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