Compaq Armada m700 Sound

[Andy Sparrow]

> I saw a reference to this problem from a year or two ago, but apparently no
> one posted a solution.
> 
> I have a Compaq Armada m700 notebook running FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE-p8
> 
> The sound card is detected, and when I play something with xmms or mpg123,
> it appears to be playing, but no sound comes out.  If I boot into Win2k
> sound works fine.
...
> $ dmesg | grep pcm
> pcm0: <ESS Technology Maestro-2E> port 0x3000-0x30ff irq 11 at device 8.0 on
> pci0
> pcm0: <SigmaTel STAC9721/23 AC97 Codec>

I borrowed an m700 a few years ago whilst getting my own laptop repaired. It was the first notebook I'd encountered with a Mastro-3 sound system, which was bleeding-edge beta at the time so I remember that part pretty clearly.

The experimental Maestro-3 driver wasn't in the tree at the time but it worked just fine. 

Have you tried checking the PCI ID of the sound part? If it is a Maestro-3, it'll almost certainly work better with the correct driver.

I seem to recall that the Maestro-2 driver would bind to the hardware, but not work, but I can't be sure because I've had this in /boot/loader.conf for the last 4 years (my current laptop also has a Maestro3):

snd_maestro3_load="YES"

In reference to your other issue with suspend, I'm pretty sure APMD didn't work with the m700 when I tried it, but I don't recall whether I tried 3.x or 4.x and stuff is undoubtedly very different with ACPI & 5.x...

HTH.

Cheers,

AS