GeForce 8200 in Debian

• Introduction
• The Problem
• The Fix

Introduction

I ended up with a Jetway JNC62K AM2+ GeForce 8200 motherboard with which to build a media center pc (combined with a Chenbro Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis - ES34069 for a high Spouse Acceptance Factor). In the process of setting it up I had a lot of difficulty getting the sound to work properly. Due to the sparcity of information online, I have documented what I needed to do to make it work.

Most of this has been based on This thread.

The Problem

Crackling and/or corrupt audio output. Seems independant of what you are playing, or which tool you use to play it.

The Fix

The audio device installed on the motherboard shows up in lspci as:

Using the self compile drivers from the alsa-source package in lenny (1.0.17.dfsg-4) doesn't seem to fix the crackling, neither does the one from squeeze/testing (1.0.20+dfsg-1). Trying the code from alsa in both alsa-drivers-1.0.9rc4 and alsa-drivers-1.0.9 fails to compile on my system (errors in both the linux tree, and the alsa code stopping it from compiling). In the end I had to get a daily snapshot from http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tiwai/alsa/alsa-driver/. I used alsa-driver-20090601.tar.gz. Beyond the search to find a daily snapshot, it is a pretty straight forward process. Just follow the normal ./configure ; make ; make install-modules process. With this done you will need to run ./snddevices followed by running alsaconf (part of the alsa-utils package in debian). At this point it all worked.

For the record the kernel version I am using is: 2.6.26-2-amd64