Linux Tips

Linux is great, but there are so many little gotchas all over the place that I figured I should set up a place to dump all the things I've spent time figuring out. Perhaps someone will find some of this stuff useful.

MSI KT3-ARU and Sound

This caused me no end of grief. The brief run-down of how I got it working:

• Get yourself a recent kernel - I am using 2.4.22 on Slackware 9.1
• Configure the kernel so that you install sound support, but don't install any drivers for any of the cards. (From the main menuconfig screen, go to "Sound", and check the "Enable sound support" checkbox.)
• Build and install your kernel
• Download the latest ALSA bzip. (Click here and scroll to the bottom; grab the latest tarball you can find.)
• Decompress (bzip2 -d for all the newbs) and extract to a sensible location, perhaps /usr/src or /usr/local/src
• in the extracted directory, do the standard ./configure, make, make install (as root)
• add the following lines to /etc/modules.conf (or your distro's version of this file - perhaps conf.modules):

  alias char-major-116 snd 
  options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=1 
  alias snd-card-0 snd-via8233 
  alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0 
  alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss 
  alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss 
  post-install snd-via8233 /usr/sbin/alsactl restore 
  

• give world-writeable perms to the sound devices:

  chmod a+rw /dev/dsp /dev/mixer /dev/sequencer /dev/midi

• run "alsamixer", crank the master sound volume
• run the following commands to unmute everything (these are critical!) (not that any of the above are optional) (well, maybe you don't have to recompile your kernel, but doing so will save a lot of potential headaches):

  amixer set Master 22 unmute
  amixer set Master Mono 22 unmute
  amixer set Input Gain 22 unmute
  amixer set Aux 22 unmute
  amixer set Line 22 unmute
  amixer set PCM 22 unmute
  

• execute "alsactl store" to preserve the state of the sound settings
• reboot (or do "modprobe snd-;modprobe snd-pcm-oss;modprobe snd-mixer-oss;modprobe snd-seq-oss", but if that doesn't work for you, try a reboot.

OK, things should work now. run "mpg123" on a file of your choice, and you should hear nice sound.

Oh yeah, if you hear weird reverb/echo/crappiness, try turning Master Mono volume all the way down in alsamixer. I don't know why, but this fixed my problem - even though I could turn the Mono volume back up afterwards with no ill effects.

Mplayer

This actually wasn't a huge deal, I basically had to force MPlayer to use the "OSS" driver setting instead of the "ALSA9" setting:

mplayer -vo x11 -ao oss:/dev/dsp movie.mpeg

CommuniGate Pro installation on Slackware

This is pretty straightforward, but there are a few gotchas. I couldn't make the statically-linked version of CGPro work for me. (This is the "Linux-Non-Redhat" tarball that is on the CGPro download page.) The server would seem to start up, but it would then silently die after getting halfway through creating some of the initial directory structure. The way I solved this problem was by downloading the Redhat RPM, converting it to .tgz with rpm2tgz, extracting the resulting tarball to a temp directory, and then moving the files into appropriate locations. Wherever you decide to move the CommuniGate "Base Directory", you need to make sure it is recursively owned by root, group mail, and that its permissions are 2770 all the way down the tree:

	chown -R root:mail /var/CommuniGate
	chmod -R 2770 /var/CommuniGate

This assumes that your mail group is "mail" and that you've set the base directory as /var/CommuniGate.

The startup script is simple, but you will need to modify it if you are using a non-default Application or Base directory. Note that the $APPLICATION directory refers to the parent directory of the "CommuniGate" server directory, so if the path to CGServer was /usr/foo/bar/CommuniGate/CGServer, then APPLICATION should be set to "/usr/foo/bar".