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I've come across some interesting issues with sound support on my two
Shuttles that I think illustrate an important difference between the closed-
source and open-source approaches to driver development.

Vendors offer quite a range of different sound hardware, but this is based
around a smaller number of different actual underlying chipsets. For closed-
source Windows, each vendor will offer their own driver that you have to
download and install; even if two different pieces of hardware are built on
the same chipset, you'd be ill-advised to try the driver for one with the
other. Each vendor will provide only the options they think you will need to
control, and no more.

In the open-source approach, the developers see the commonality between the
chipsets, and create one common driver for that chipset, with configurable
options to tweak its behaviour for different vendors' implementations.

In my older Shuttle, which has an "Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R)
AC'97 Audio Controller", I had no problems getting multichannel sound,
except that the centre and subwoofer channels were swapped. It took me some
digging around to discover that this is a known quirk with some hardware
implementations built on this chipset, and the ALSA driver offers a "Swap
Center/LFE" option (visible in the alsamixer utility) to fix this.

In my newer Shuttle, which has a "VIA Technologies Inc. VT1720/24
[Envy24PT/HT] PCI Multi-Channel Audio Controller", things were not so
straightforward. I could get two-channel stereo sound, but no more than
that. It was only recently that I discovered
<http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sound/alsa/ALSA-Configuration.txt>
that the relevant kernel module (snd-ice1724) has a "model" parameter, which
lets you tell it which chipset implementation you've got (in my case,
"model=sn25p" did the trick). So now I finally have surround sound on both
Shuttles. And sound input works too!

So which approach is better? The open-source approach is certainly more
scalable; try to install, say, similar cards from different vendors in the
same machine, and there's a good chance the Windows drivers will conflict,
whereas the Linux ones won't. The Windows approach may seem more appealing
in the short term, but you will hit its shortcomings sooner or later. Like
when the vendor drops support for your still perfectly good piece of
hardware, and you find that, after an OS upgrade, you will never get it
working again.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go look at my Eee. The Ubuntu Jaunty
upgrade added something called PulseAudio, which I need to figure out to get
the sound working again...

geoff wrote:
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> I've come across some interesting issues with sound support on my two
>> Shuttles
>
> Ok, what's a Shuttle ?
>
> geoff

A good idea at the time, but inevitably you end up with an overprices
aluminium case with poor acoustic properties and a dead motherboard that
you can't replace for less then the cost of a whole new machine after a
couple of years.

In message <gtlp58$ei$>, Richard wrote:

> A [Shuttle is a] good idea at the time, but inevitably you end up with an
> overprices aluminium case with poor acoustic properties and a dead
> motherboard that you can't replace for less then the cost of a whole new
> machine after a couple of years.

They're good-quality machines. The older one is coming up to 5 years old.
They have a reputation for good-quality power supplies. I bought the first
one back when I lived in a cramped flat with limited space. And they're easy
on the eyes, too--important to a guy who used Macs for many years.