Compaq Armada 7400 sound

Problems and successes with specific brands/models of computer audio hardware
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chris667
Posts: 31
Joined: Tue 01 Apr 2008, 13:41

Compaq Armada 7400 sound

#1 Post by chris667 »

I rescued this good quality but battered laptop from the dump. It has a mobile Pentium 2 366Mhz processor and 64MB ram, but the hard drive was making an awful racket. It gave up, so I fitted a CF-IDE adaptor and a compact flash card. £10 for a working laptop that runs faster than it did when it was new isn't bad. 8)

Getting the sound to work in Puppy 4.0 was a nightmare. The Alsa wizard didn't work and I couldn't find a reference to it on the forum, so I tried to look in the BIOS. After dozens of reboots and every key combination I could think of I had to give up.

It seems the BIOS setup is on a partition on the hard disk. I went to the compaq website, and found I could download a floppy image of the BIOS setup, unfortunately my laptop has no floppy drive. B***er. :(
Luckily, there was a white paper on installing Linux on this laptop, which says the Armada used a ESS1879 sound chip and what its default setup values were.
I added

Code: Select all

pnpbios=off
to my /boot/grub/menu.lst
then I added

Code: Select all

modprobe snd_es18xx isapnp=0 port=0x220 mpu_port=0x330 dma1=1 irq=5
to /etc/rc.d/rc.local
After a reboot, I had sound!

(MODS - sorry if I posted this in the wrong place, feel free to move it)

digdugdiggy
Posts: 17
Joined: Mon 10 Nov 2008, 05:02

#2 Post by digdugdiggy »

GREAT SOLUTION!

I installed a new hard drive to my Compaq Armada 7400 laptop

specs=
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quic ... 5_div.html

Couldnt get the sound to work with the sound wizard, only got loud bleeps from the function key + audio volume button (F5).

Followed the instructions here, works great! Thanks alot I really appreciate this.

Maybe this should be added to some sort of list concerning audio issues and this bump may help it get that attention.

THANKS AGAIN!

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