On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Duncan McEwan wrote:

> We have a Compaq EVO D500 Pentium-IV with the Intel 845 chipset that we are
> trying out and have been unable to get the audio to work.
>
> Xmms fails to play an mpeg3 file, and if I try something much simpler I get the
> following...
>
> 	 cat welcome.au > /dev/audio
> 	 /dev/audio: Invalid argument.

Have you tried

	audioplay welcome.au

?

> Audioctl does return reasonable looking information, as does mixerctl, but
> those programs open /dev/audioctl and /dev/mixer respectively so maybe this
> isn't so surprising.
>
> Is the problem a result of the "unknown (0xffff5360) codec" diagnostic
> that we are getting during boot?  I've seen the table of known codec's in
> "dev/ic/ac97.c", but from a (admitably quick) look through the code all an
> entry in that table would do is cause a prettier identifier to be printed
> at boot time.

Maybe not. The "unknown codec" could be a winmodem, or an FM
synthesizer -- probably nothing essential.

Frederick