2 Supported Sound Hardware

The following sound cards are supported by the Linux kernel:

• Roland MPU-401 MIDI interface
• AdLib
• SoundBlaster (version 1 and 2) and compatibles, including ThunderBoard and ATI Stereo F/X
• SoundBlaster Pro (version 1 and 2)
• Sound Galaxy NX Pro (in its compatibility mode with SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 and support for its special mixer)
• SoundBlaster 16
• ProAudioSpectrum 16 (and the compatible Logitech SoundMan 16)
• Advanced Gravis UltraSound (GUS)
• GUS MAX (2.9 driver and later)
• Microsoft Sound System (2.9 driver and later)
• Personal Sound System (2.9 driver and later)

Other sound cards that are claimed to be compatible with one of the supported sound cards may work if they are hardware (i.e. register level) compatible. Some cards described as "100% SoundBlaster compatible" are not register compatible.

The Sound Galaxy NX Pro is supported as a SoundBlaster compatible. Answer "yes" to the question "Do you want support for the mixer of SG NX Pro" when the sound driver is configured (in versions prior to 2.9 you must manually add #define __SGNXPRO__ to the sound driver local.h file).

Note that if you have a Sound Galaxy NX Pro and a Logitech Busmouse, you must configure the card (using the SGPFIG utility on the driver diskettes) to use base address 0x240 in order to operate your mouse. The SGNXPRO has a Covox Speech Thing compatibility mode which has its control register at the base+0x01C which is the Logitech Busmouse control register address when the SGNXPRO base address is set to 0x220 (thanks to Matti Aarnio (mea@utu.fi) for this information).

The Linux kernel supports the SCSI port provided on some sound cards (e.g. ProAudioSpectrum 16). There is also support for CD-ROM drives attached to the Soundblaster Pro and SoundBlaster 16 CD-ROM port (see the file /usr/src/linux/drivers/block/README.sbpcd).

A loadable kernel module to support joystick ports, including those provided on some sound cards, is also available.

Note that the kernel SCSI, CD-ROM, and sound drivers are completely independent of each other.

An alternate sound driver is available that requires no additional sound hardware; it uses the internal PC speaker. It is mostly software compatible with the sound card driver, but, as might be expected, provides much lower quality output and has much more CPU overhead. The results seem to vary, being dependent on the characteristics of the individual loudspeaker. For more information, see the documentation provided with the release.

The current version is 0.7, and can be found at site sunsite.unc.edu in the file /pub/Linux/kernel/patches/console/pcsndrv-0.7.tar.gz.

Another option is to build a digital to analog converter using a parallel printer port. This provides better sound quality but still has a lot of CPU overhead. The PC sound driver package mentioned above supports this, and includes instructions for building the necessary hardware.