Some problems on a ThinkPad A30P (again...)

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

beh@icemark.net writes:
 > First, a big thanks for the help I got so far  (reg. kapm-idled thread)...
 > 
 > Today I've experimented some more, and found the following:
 > 
 > 
 >  - even ALSA 0.90beta11 can't solve the suspend problem. I also noticed
 >    something rather strange, that I didn't realize before  (due to
 >    auto-loading of modules):
 > 	When I try to load "snd-card-intel8x0" for the first time,
 > 	modprobe complains about the card not being found or being
 > 	busy.
 > 	When I try to load the same module a second time,
 > 	everything works "fine"...
 >    But - WHY would linux at first say, the card isn't there, but
 >    find and initialize the card on the second run?

I had been running ALSA 0.9.0beta8a for some time, because whenever I
upgraded beyond that with either 2.2 or 2.4 kernels I would get similar
problems, in particular crashes when trying to suspend my laptop.

Eventually I decided to give ALSA 0.9.0beta11 a go with 2.4.17, and
then my machine would crash just trying to play sounds.

So I cursed for a while and then took another look at the ALSA
documentation.  They no longer say to modprobe "snd-card-foo", but just
"snd-foo" for your driver of choice.  In addition some other aspects of
the module hierarchy for ALSA seem to have changed, such that I gathered
trying to install a newer ALSA module stack over the old one would leave
some old modules around.

Once I had a from-scratch install of ALSA 0.9.0beta11 over a
from-scratch install of 2.4.18-rc1 and its modules, and modified
modules.conf to load snd-intel8x0 instead of snd-card-intel8x0,
everything started working fine.  In fact, I no longer have to have the
apmd suspend script to unload all the ALSA modules before a suspend and
reload them on resume -- the APM support in ALSA seems to have improved
significantly.