[PLUG] Motherboard sound

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Thu Jun 13 07:55:36 UTC 2002


On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Paul Johnston wrote:
> Should I get a motherboard without built-in sound (or with built-in
> sound disabled) and use a simple sound card with known support for
> Linux?  Is the driver problem due to the built-in sound, or is it due
> to the fact that the most current Linux distros may not support the
> most current sound technology?

I'm going to go out on a speculative limb here and suggest that perhaps
the problem is that many on-board sound solutions use short-run
proprietary chipsets (or single-chip solutions, more likely) that aren't
common enough for the community to develop useful drivers OR are designed
to run with significant software emulation under MS Windows.

A 2.4 kernel supports a staggering variety of sound devices, to my eye,
and if you include those supported by the ALSA project, you get nearly
every major device, current and antiquated.

I would suggest taking the extra few minutes to double-check the chipset
on the board against the supported lists (directly supported by the
kernel, its OSS modules, or ALSA) and just avoid anything that isn't
there.  If you have or can acquire a cheap sound card that is supported
and you're not an audiophile, then go ahead and get a board without sound
and use the cheap card.  I can't recommend the third option of disabling
the onboard sound in order to use an off-board sound card because I've had
terrible experiences disabling on-board features with some motherboards.  
It's not a sure-fire problem, but I just try to avoid the situation
entirely if I can.

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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