Want a good way to blow a lot of hours? Try to get sound working on an old Thinkpad 600e laptop. After a long afternoon, I’m very close. Not perfect yet… but close enough for now.
As a refresher, I’m running xubuntu.
I started my quest with this article at the ubuntu forums. It seemed like it was on the right track, but I just couldn’t quite pull it off. However, that thread lead me to another helpful site. Similar, but not quite the same. And still didn’t quite get me there.
At some point, I caught my old friend Vox online and tormented him with my newbosity (new word!). I gotta say, he’s remarkably patient… he helped me try quite a variety of things, and I think we were quite close a few times but we still didn’t quite get it. The good thing is, whenver we chat about linux support I always learn new ways of doing things.
While taking a break from annoying Vox, I did some more searching and stumbled over this article in the thinkwiki. It, in turn pointed me to a nice one titled, “Script for configuring the CS4239 sound chip in PnP mode” and that’s what helped me hear my first *ding* from the laptop.
I first had to make the soundcard-on script +x. But it still didn’t work, so I ran
modprobe snd-cs4236
and found that there’s an error in the last line of the script. It refers to something I don’t have! (in bold):
modprobe –ignore-install snd-cs4236 port=$port cport=$cport fm_port=$oplport irq=$irq dma1=$dma1 dma2=$dma2 isapnp=0 index=0 && /lib/alsa/modprobe-post-install snd-cs4236
Dunno what modprobe-post-install is or where I’d get it from, but until I have a few hours, I’m going to live without it. For now, I just run that modprobe statement after I log in; this works fine since I don’t tend to reboot this machine often. I tried adding it to the end of the script (above), but no dice.
Anyways, if a Thinkpad 600e owner stumbles over this, maybe one of those links will help out.
Possibly Related posts:
August 14th, 2006 
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Chris,
I have been running Xubuntu on my TP 600e for quite a while now. It is a nuisance to have to fix the sound every time I reinstall, but it isn’t too difficult.
A blog post about it is here: http://grumpymole.blogspot.com/2006/10/thinkpad-600e-sound-problem-still-not.html
The solution is summarised in a malone bug about it: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-cirrus/+bug/40116
Let me know if you still can’t get it working.
Regards
Warren
[...] Back in August, I wrote a post titled “The Quest for Noise” in which I described my trials and tribulations with getting the combination of my old Thinkpad 600E and Xubuntu to make noise without manually running a script after each reboot. [...]