Puppy hangs when cmpci sound module starts (Solved)

[goncal]

Hello there,

I downloaded 1.0.4 and installed it, loved it, and now downloaded and installed 1.0.5.

I absolutely love Puppy and must say it is an amazing distro. I had been trying Knoppix which is fine and nice but I find Puppy so much more - ergonomic, everything is where I expect it to be, menus are clear, and just the right amount of stuff around. I am using ChubbyPuppy which is great. Planning to install plain Puppy on an old Pentium I 64MB RAM computer and hope to succeed.

Sorry for the long intro, had to put it all down in writing.

I am about to leave Windows behind for ever if ever I can solve the following problems:

1. I cannot get my sound card to work. C-Media CM8738.

Details: Driver does come with Puppy. Module is cmpci. I have been using modprobe to load and unload modules as suggested by Puppy help. They do. Everything fine, they appear on and disappear from lsmod every time, no errors shown, -v switch used, etc. System Information Modules list (Puppy's Hardware Probe) also OK.

But, whenever I start an application which has sound, as soon as sound starts, it goes into a (short) loop, and the computer hangs.

Happened with 1.0.4 and now with 1.0.5.

I tried starting up applications which will play sound, having unloaded - modprobe -r cmpci - the driver, and everything goes well i.e. the video shows and no sound is produced.

Then I load modprobe cmpci back and try the same thing again, and the computer hangs as usual.

I have even spent (half) sleepless nights trying to solve this as I would be so excited that I could leave win-doze behind, but no, it did not happen - yet.

2. and 3. are less important but there they go.

2. I need to install Puppy on laptop(s) with WiFi connection to ADSL router.

3. I like watching videos on Yahoo! Music and I cannot as even if I download the suggested Netscape 7.1 version (yes, I succeeded once) the format is Windows Media and apparently Linux cannot play it... or can it?

Thanks a lot to anyone who actually made it to the end of this message which may only just be too long ...

Greetings,

[Walt H]

3. I like watching videos on Yahoo! Music and I cannot as even if I download the suggested Netscape 7.1 version (yes, I succeeded once) the format is Windows Media and apparently Linux cannot play it... or can it?
Greetings,

The answer, at least in my case, is, it depends. Gxine can play some Windows Media files (you'll need either the xine-extra-codecs-1 pupget or the codecs dotpup put together by klhrevolutionist) and then, maybe it will work.

I have found that linked files play fine in gxine, but embedded video does not work for me. In Windows Media format, it either hangs (BBC News) or the sound is garbled (as is the case with AP news video). Others seem to have had better success, but I'm not sure how. I downloaded and installed Firefox and the MediaPlayerConnectivity extension, which helped me get this working in Kanotix, but it doesn't work with Puppy. This is THE one thing that keeps Puppy from being my permanent full-time OS.

Now, I'm off to try Zenwalk and see if this works any better. Good luck to you.

[goncal]

Hi Walt (sorry, good grief am I good with names)

Thank you for your reply which helped.

As for sound problems I finally decided to enable the Intel sound card on the motherboard, and modprobe'd out both drivers (Intel's and C-Media's) and then modprobe'd back the Intel driver and all is OK now as I can listen to all soundtracks. I would probably now say I feel 99.9% Windoze-independent.

Trouble is, some drivers for USB hardware, like digital cameras or WiFi units, hardly available for Puppy... That is the only reason Puppy co-lives with Windoze on my hard disk, with a huge 700MB pup001 file. I now boot off a floppy disk which will boot Puppy off the HD, so when I need to start Puppy I just put in the floppy and when I need to run Windoze I eject it. Puppy will boot faster than Windoze will de-hybernate.

I tried GXgine as included in 1.0.5 and it seems to cope with most formats although it will play some Windows Media with no sound.

Problem I have is, when I go to BBC TV 24h News webpage, GXgine will not start as the browser would like it to ("gxgine plugin" shows up on the window), so I do not get any BBC News which is annoying. Any workaround available?

Greetings

Gon

[Flash]

...Trouble is, some drivers for USB hardware, like digital cameras or WiFi units, hardly available for Puppy... That is the only reason Puppy co-lives with Windoze on my hard disk

Have you tried this dotpup?

Problem I have is, when I go to BBC TV 24h News webpage, GXgine will not start as the browser would like it to ("gxgine plugin" shows up on the window), so I do not get any BBC News which is annoying. Any workaround available?

Greetings

Gon

[Walt H]

...Trouble is, some drivers for USB hardware, like digital cameras or WiFi units, hardly available for Puppy... That is the only reason Puppy co-lives with Windoze on my hard disk

I don't know about the digital camera, because I never tried connecting ours under Puppy, but I never had trouble with my wireless USB adapter. With either Perl or the separate development package (can't remember the name, only know it allows compiling in Puppy), my Belkin 5FD7050 worked like a champ.

Problem I have is, when I go to BBC TV 24h News webpage, GXgine will not start as the browser would like it to ("gxgine plugin" shows up on the window), so I do not get any BBC News which is annoying. Any workaround available?

Greetings

Gon

[goncal]

Hello Walt and Flash

Thanks for your replies, Walt I must try this Zen. I have been trying and trying with Gxgine and RealPlayer which I downloaded as a DotPup but I cannot find how to switch helpers in Mozilla, as it will invoke Gxgine all the time for BBC News and it will not play.

Also for some reason Gxgine will play sound but RealPlayer will not, I have not come across any solution for that (or anyone else with that problem).

Flash, thanks for your suggestion regarding USB drivers as they will be of great help, I have not tried them yet but am sure they will work, when I plug in my digital camera the USB information program will come up with the name of the camera and so on but will not see any drive in it or mount it for that matter.

Greetings, Gon

[goncal]

Hello Walt and Flash

Thanks for your replies, Walt I must try this Zen. I have been trying and trying with Gxgine and RealPlayer which I downloaded as a DotPup but I cannot find how to switch helpers in Mozilla, as it will invoke Gxgine all the time for BBC News and it will not play.

Also for some reason Gxgine will play sound but RealPlayer will not, I have not come across any solution for that (or anyone else with that problem).

Flash, thanks for your suggestion regarding USB drivers as they will be of great help, I have not tried them yet but am sure they will work, when I plug in my digital camera the USB information program will come up with the name of the camera and so on but will not see any drive in it or mount it for that matter.

Greetings, Gon

[Walt H]

Hello Walt and Flash

Thanks for your replies, Walt I must try this Zen. I have been trying and trying with Gxgine and RealPlayer which I downloaded as a DotPup but I cannot find how to switch helpers in Mozilla, as it will invoke Gxgine all the time for BBC News and it will not play.

I think I also had this problem in Mozilla. I installed Firefox and the MediaConnectivity extension (not sure of the actual name), which allows you to specify which application opens the various media file types.

Also for some reason Gxgine will play sound but RealPlayer will not, I have not come across any solution for that (or anyone else with that problem).

My problem was similar. I got to the point where RealPlayer would play embedded video but not the sound. Gxine would not play either, although it worked fine for linked rather than embedded media files.

[goncal]

Thanks for the support Walt - it felt as though I was the only one without any sound out of RealPlayer - have been playing around and set some "audio" strings in RP's init file to =1 instead of =0 but nothing happening either - however when I drag the volume control some noise will come out of the speakers as though I was "doing something" with the sound ie actually altering the master volume - but still no sound whenever playing any audio and/or video.

BTW can Zenwalk be booted off a CD without any alteration whatsoever to an HD ie Puppy-like?

Gon