less is more? blahonga. [back to index]
Fri Nov 9 22:00:08 CET 2007 vaio pcg-505rs and sound -- Well, the night I wrote the last entry, I managed to install Xubuntu Gutsy onto the PCG-505RS. It was really quite simple. The hard part was finding the necessary hardware components- but I found the power cable for the pcmcia CD-ROM reader after digging around a bit, and two hours later I had xubuntu up and running... Well. 'Running' is perhaps stretching it. It was crawling. XFCE is known to be stingy with resources, but... well, after watching the tortuous startup of gdm, followed by the ten minute startup of xfce... So I decided to ditch the pre-installed components and go with xdm and fvwm for the login-screen and the window manager. I dont really need a desktop manager anyway, since its only recently I started to use them. Instead of firefox (which, when surfing to this extremely minimal blog, gobbles up 40.1% of my precious 64M of ram), I use dillo. Dillo renders ugly pages, but hey- its better than lynx, and when looking at this blog, it takes only 9.6% of my memory. Like I said, it renders like crap, so I'll see if I can minimize firefox a bit. Like removing support for googling for stuff in advance, keeping pages in history in memory, and the like. Emacs is a memory hog as well, but so is vim. Both lie at around 10-15% of ram. not much of a difference, and I can run emacs in servermode, so I only need one instance of the app in memory. Anyway, I had some problems with the sound card, which wasn't discovered by the OS at all. No info in lspci, lshw, nor in dmesg. I knew that there was some sort of sound-blaster compati- ble card onboard, since the machine makes plays a melody when booting. I installed lspnp and here's it's output: fimblo@kasama:~$ lspnp 00:00 PNP0c02 Motherboard resources 00:01 PNP0c01 System board 00:02 PNP0200 AT DMA controller 00:03 PNP0000 AT programmable interrupt controller 00:04 PNP0100 AT system timer 00:05 PNP0b00 AT real-time clock 00:06 PNP0303 IBM enhanced keyboard (101/102-key, PS/2 mouse support) 00:07 PNP0c04 Math coprocessor 00:08 PNP0800 AT speaker 00:09 PNP0a03 PCI bus 00:0a ESS1879 (unknown) 00:0b PNP0e03 Intel 82365-compatible CardBus controller 00:0c PNP0700 PC standard floppy disk controller 00:0f PNP0401 ECP printer port 00:10 PNP0501 16550A-compatible serial port 00:13 SMCf010 SMC Fast Infrared Port 00:14 ROK0010 (unknown) 00:15 PNP0f13 PS/2 port for PS/2-style mice 00:17 ESS0009 (unknown) Im like... hmm. I recognize that string ESS1879. After googling a bit, I found the machine's specs over at Sony (http://www.sony.jp/ProductsPark/Con- sumer/PCOM/Note505RX/spec.html). And there it states, loud and clear, that Im dealing with a ES1879S. So I ran the following command: sudo modprobe snd-es18xx isap- np=0, and tested by playing some ABBA. Worked! yay! --