[Alsa-user] Audio clients block - how to start troubleshooting?

[david f. <wb...@ho...>]

I'm working on fresh install of the "puppy" linux distribution (version 
2.12) on an older machine, a HP Omnibook 800CT. It is a 166 MHz Pentium with 
80M RAM, circa 1998 or so.

The machine is distributed with alsa wizard version 1.08, which finds the 
sound peripheral for the machine (snd-es18xx).

/proc/asound/version reports version 1.0.12rc1.
/proc/asound/card0 is linked to ES1887.
/proc/asound/modules contains snd_es18xx.
/proc/asound/pcm includes "ESS AudioDrive ES1887 : playback 2 : capture 1"
/proc/asound/cards includes "ESS1887 at 0x220, irq 5, dma1 1, dma2 0"

The problem I've found is that applications using the sound interface can 
neither record nor playback - in both cases no data is transferred. 
Alsamixer version 1.0.11 appears to control the sound device properly 
(increasing master volume to maximum makes a hiss begin to appear in the 
machine's speakers, and increasing the mic gain above about 20% begins to 
cause feedback.) When I try to use a sound-based application, CPU 
utilization remains at idle level. I tried arecord -d 3 testfile and it 
hangs until I manually interrupt it. I tried aplay (followed by one of the 
.wav files in the distribution - about 4k bytes long), and while aplay 
reports the type of audio in the file and appears to try to start sound 
output (a click is hear in the laptop speaker), it then pauses for about 10 
seconds then exits.

How do I approach troubleshooting this? I have no prior experience with 
alsa, so perhaps I am missing something obvious.

Thanks very much,

Dave
wb...@ho...

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