Howto get Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24/30 working in Debian GNU/Linux

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Recently I have been trying to get the sound working on a Thinkpad I have been lent (I think it's a T20) in Debian GNU/Linux.

I did

sudo alsaconf

but it couldn't find my card so I ran

lspci -vv

and found

00:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24/30 [CrystalClear SoundFusion Audio Accelerator] (rev 01)
Subsystem: IBM Device 0153
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster- SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=slow >TAbort- SERR- Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 11
Region 0: Memory at e8122000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
Region 1: Memory at e8000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
Capabilities:

Evidently I had problems.
On this forum I found the following instructions:
(run as root)

wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.17.tar.bz2
tar xf alsa-driver-1.0.17.tar.bz2
rm alsa-driver-1.0.17.tar.bz2
cd alsa-driver-1.0.17/
./configure --with-cards=cs46xx --with-sequencer=yes --with-isapnp=no --disable-verbose-printk
make
make install
modprobe snd-cs46xx

then do

sudo alsamixer

and press m to unmute the master channel which will be muted by default.

Apparently the module isn't in Debian by default due to licencing issues, so be aware you may be using non-free code, or code of ambiguous origin.

It is not a beautiful method as it does not use debian's module assistant program but it might just work... at least until you apt-get upgrade.... :-/
As described on this forum if this works for you just add snd-cs46xx to /etc/modules

echo "snd-cs46xx" >> /etc/modules

Let me know if it helps you!

Tags:

Yes that worked except that

Yes that worked except that I had to get alsa-driver-1.0.20.tar.bz2
when building against Linux kernel 2.6.27-1-mepis-smp. Version 1.0.17 of the alsa-driver gave a compile error.
I'm running AntiX-M8.2 on a Thinkpad A21p.

I appreciate your post. Thanks very much!

bgunn (not verified) | Sun, 06/09/2009 - 21:21

glad it helped! Sorry it

glad it helped! Sorry it didn't work out of the box!

tdobson | Mon, 07/09/2009 - 20:18

Wow. That worked! The

Wow. That worked! The quality might not be the best; the mp3 I just tested cut out at points, but it's better than nothing.

Thanks!

John (not verified) | Thu, 21/05/2009 - 23:19

This is so odd, I just

This is so odd, I just rebuilt the machine for max, it seems to just **work** (indeed it seemed to just work before as well). The only issues I have with it are the expected ones (lack of muliplexing.. odd volume control issues, having to mess around after hibernation etc..).

In any case, good post.

ajehals | Mon, 23/03/2009 - 20:00

did you have the non-free

did you have the non-free repositories enabled?

tdobson | Thu, 23/04/2009 - 11:02

just realised how aged that

just realised how aged that comment is.
I really should get a bayersian spam filter instead of having a manual process...

tdobson | Thu, 23/04/2009 - 11:03

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