Specifications

4. Installation
Configuring Linux to support sound involves the following steps:
Installing the sound card. 1.
Configuring Plug and Play (if applicable). 2.
Configuring and building the kernel for sound support. 3.
Creating the device files. 4.
Booting the Linux kernel and testing the installation. 5.
Some Linux distributions provide a sound driver configuration utility that will detect your sound card and set
up all of the necessary configuration files to load the appropriate sound drivers for your card. Red Hat Linux,
for example, provides the sndconfig utility. If your distribution provides such a tool I suggest you try
using it. If it works for you then you can skip the rest of the instructions in this section.
If this fails or you want to follow the manual method in order to better understand what you are doing, then
the next sections will cover each of these steps in detail.
4.1. Installing the Sound Card
Follow the manufacturer's instructions for installing the hardware or have your dealer perform the installation.
Older sound cards usually have switch or jumper settings for IRQ, DMA channel, etc; note down the values
used. If you are unsure, use the factory defaults. Try to avoid conflicts with other devices (e.g. ethernet cards,
SCSI host adaptors, serial and parallel ports) if possible.
Usually you should use the same I/O port, IRQ, and DMA settings that work under DOS. In some cases
though (particularly with PnP cards) you may need to use different settings to get things to work under Linux.
Some experimentation may be needed.
4.2. Configuring ISA Plug and Play
Some sound cards use the ISA Plug and Play protocol to configure settings for i/o addresses, interrupts, and
DMA channels. If you have a newer PCI−bus type of sound card, or one of the very old ISA sound cards that
uses fixed settings or jumpers, then you can skip this section.
The preferred way to configure Plug and Play cards is to use the isapnp tools which ship with most Linux
distributions (or you can download them from Red Hat's web site http://www.redhat.com/).
First check the documentation for your Linux distribution. It may already have Plug and Play support set up
for you or it may work slightly differently than described here. If you need to configure it yourself,the details
can be found in the man pages for the isapnp tools. Briefly the process you would normally follow is:
Use pnpdump to capture the possible settings for all your Plug and Play devices, saving the result to
the file /etc/isapnp.conf.
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Choose settings for the sound card that do not conflict with any other devices in your system and•
4. Installation 9