ST20G5 no sound in Linux?

[msull]

Hello all,

I'm trying to build out an ST20G5 as a PVR box (MythTV) and have installed Linux on it, but have a very strange problem. The OS just cannot see the embedded sound card at all. lspci or lshw just does not show the soundcard at all. I've had little problems with Windows (once I had the right drivers), but installing ALSA on the box is impossible until the soundcard can actually be seen. Tried the latest and testing kernels (6.11, 6.12) with no success. Has anyone got sound working on one of these boxes under Linux?

Thanks,

M.

[ikonia]

does it say if that card is supported ?

is lspci etc showing it as unknown hardware or just not showing anything at all ?
is the drivers for the bus the sound card sits on working ?
are the chipset drivers ok ?
does dmesg bitch about anything on boot ?
is it a multifunction driver eg: network card related to sound card ?

just some food for thought

[DJWillis]

msull,

A few things…

What distro are you using to put MythTV on top?

The ST20G5 uses the RealTek ALC-880 HD Audio codec and this is known to be a bit of a sod under Linux.

You could 'try' the following…

The Realek ALC-880 to my knowledge works with the snd_azx module from ALSA but NOT if you put ALSA in the kernel.

Try compiling ALSA from source and remember to drop OSS and ALSA support from your kernel but make sure you leave in sound support.

That said several people have reported that by doing this they can only get stereo (2 channels) working and no Digital Optical output/input. I have some notes from when I was fighting with this damm codec under Linux that I can dig out, fairly sure I got the card going as advertised before the PC with the ALC-880 died.

Edit: Have you played with the Linux RealTek patches for the ALC-880?

[msull]

Thanks for the tips guys.

I am using Gentoo as the distro. I also tried booting up under Knoppix to see if it could find the soundcard, with no luck. I have to boot both distros with noapic option in order to get around the clockspeed issues with the motherboard.

It is a Relatek card in there, and snd_azx or snd_hda-intel (for ALSA 1.0.8 or 1.0.9) should both work. However, they do not for me. I have built them both outside of the kernel in Gentoo with no luck, with several different kernels.

My big problem, I think, is that the soundcard does not even show up when I do an lspci, or an lshw. No audio device whatsoever shows up at all. Tried building in all sorted of PCI drivers into the kernel in case it is a bus driver thing, but no luck at all. Pretty frustrated by the board at this point, this ATI motherboard is not linux friendly at all. I know that people with the ATI motherboard chipset have got it working, but they all seem to be able to see the soundcard with an lspci. I wonder if it is the specific Shuttle version of the board that is the culprit?

Has anyone out there installed Linux on the ST20G5 and gotten sound out of it?

[dayn]

Hi,

I share your pain!!

Suse will not pick up to existence of any sound hardware at all. A slight limitation for a HTPC!!

I did see this thread on a German forum (translated via Google), but I'm not too sure they have got very far.

http://translate.google.com/translat...en-GB:official

I also have problems with the USB. Do I need specific drivers or modules to get USB working? My Firewire ports worked straight away without any config.

Thanks,

Nathan

[tom123]

I did see this thread on a German forum (translated via Google), but I'm not too sure they have got very far.

Hi guys,

Here we are from the thread mentioned above. Sound with ST20G5? No problem. I am running SuSE 9.2. Forget the alsa drivers coming with the default kernel of SuSE 9.2. Forget yast configuration. Follow these steps:

- Download a new Bios image from Shuttle website
- Flash this image into your ST20G5
- Download alsa driver 1.0.10rc1 or newer
- Compile and install
- Add the parameter position_fix=1, when loading the snd-hda-intel module

Enjoy the sound!

Currently some outputs are routed wrongly. For instance, if I play a simple 2.0 stereo file, I get sound out of "line-in" and "front-out" jacks at the rear side. At the front side sound is applied at the "mic" jack instead of "headphone" jack. I reported this error to alsa bug tracking system. Hope it will be fixed the next time.

Thomas