I just bought a nice pro sound card to use on my nice laptop.
I have for many years wanted to get into music again and now I decided
that it was now or newer. So when the opportunity came and I had the
chance to buy this nice card relatively cheap, I decided to jump into
it.
I have used many different linux dists and have decided to use
dyne::bolic for this project. It has a nice collection of software,
some nice people on the mailinglist and overall seems to have created
this dist out of love and in the spirit of open source. I like that and
now I'll on these pages document every step I take with the
project.
The first goal is to have dyne 2 installed on my hard drive, and have
the main hardware (keyboard, mouse, screen, wireless network and sound) working on the machine.
First I have to examine all my hardware so I know what I have in my hands. Here you see the soundcard I bought.
Its a ... well it doesn't look like that but I think is actually a:
I went to the dyne:bolic site to download the newest file. It turned out to be the Dhoruba 2.3 file that can be downloaded from here.
This is one single file: dyne-2.3.iso. This file has to be burned onto a CD or a DVD. I only had a DVD so I used this command to burn it:
0) I opened the terminal program
1) I went into the folder that had the dyne-2.3.iso file. Which was the 'Desktop' folder in my case, so I used the command:
cd Desktop
2) Then I made the following command:
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=dyne-2.3.iso
Thats was all that was required to burn the file to the DVD.
Now I was ready to boot from the new burned DVD. I rebooted the machine and made sure to hold down the 'esc' button (a lot of other machines require to hold down the 'delete' button to get into the socalled BIOS program: a program that decides among other things, which medium you will boot from. I decided that the first boot option should be the DVD , went out of the BIOS and sure enough, the machine started to spin the DVD ans soon I was greeted with a black welcome screen in which I had some different possible ways to boot the dyne:bolic. I just8went for it and hit the enter key without doing anything. After a couple of minutes I was greeted with a very nice desktop 1024x768 pixel(not the correct which is 1280x800)
Woohaa .... mouse worked right out of the box, the screen worked (well quite worked ) the touchpad worked and .. I had to wait in exitement, did I have sound ??
Getting the sound to work:
Sound has been quite a trick on this laptop (Znote 6515wd). A lot of distributions (ubuntu breezy, dapper and edgy, freespire and others) have not detected it correct.
I have installed PClinuxOS on it and on that one it worked right out of the box, so I was anxious to see if it actually would work on this music specific dist. Well it did. I had to go into a linux terminal and and type: alsamixer, find the XXXXXX and ... (to be continued )
Well I had to shift from that machine due to the motherboard broke.
So finally I have a new laptop - an thinkpad r40 which can take a pcmcia card and this works fine.
To get the card working I had to do the following:
1) put it into the pcmcia slot and start the machine
2) install alsa-firmware: ' sudo apt-get install alsa-firmware' and the firmware loader: 'sudo apt-get install alsa-firmware-loaders' .
3) after that I could load the cardbus with:
'sudo hdsploader'
and start the mixer with:
sudo hdspmixer.
Now I could start jack with 'qjackctl' and start to connect my equipment :-)
