Fedora Core 3 Sound Problems

What I discovered after my previous post is that while I now had sound on my Toshiba 4600, it sounded like garbage. I started up XMMS to listen to a few oggs and when I turned up the volume the music came across fuzzy and distorted. No amount of fussing with the mixer controls or XMMS would correct it.

I discovered that going into the preferences (Ctl+P) of XMMS the Output Plugin was set on "eSound" and switching it to the "ALSA" driver fixed the sound and made it crystal clear.

Fedora Core 3 on Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600

I recently upgraded my notebook from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 3. It was a smooth install with the exception of two common annoyances: no sound and no wireless network connection. This problem was different from my Fedora Core 2 installation on the notebook in which it did not even see the wireless card, and having no time to fuss with it, I re-installed FC1. In FC3 both the Intel 82801BA/BAM AC'97 audio card and the internal Intersil PRISM2 wireless card were detected, however, I could not activate them.

After searching the Fedora Forum I came across this link in which greeners posted a solution which worked on his 4600. Apparently there is a problem with IRQ 11 being used by the ACPI module and it interferes with both the sound card and the wireless NIC interface. The solution is to add an option to the kernel load statement in the grub loader configuration.

Edit the /etc/grub.conf file and append "pci=noacpi" to the end of the kernel line as illustrated below:

title Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.667)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet pci=noacpi
        initrd /initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img

Reboot the notebook and you should have a working sound card now. To enable the wireless card I simply went into the Network Configuration and added a new "Wireless Device" device type as eth1.