The Junk In My Trunk

So I’ve been trying to put Debian Etch on my Thinkpad T20 that I have. It doesn’t have an LCD screen, so I am going to use it as an mp3 “server” type of computer - possibly for my car. It’s been quite a process. My first problem was that my particular Thinkpad didn’t have on board lan, so the net install cd that I was using couldn’t get an Internet connection. I thought this was going to be a problem, but after some experimentation it turned out to be a good thing (Debian has some issues with PCMCIA wireless card drivers getting an IP address correctly from a DHCP server I guess).

I had some network card issues with a PCMCIA wireless network card that I have, but I figure those issues aren’t related to the ThinkPad, so I’ll leave them off of this post.

Instead, I’ll talk about the sound card that the T20 has. (This also applies to the T21 and T22 I believe.) The Thinkpad T20 has a Cirrus Logic sound card that uses the cs46xx module. This module is built into all new linux kernels - except one tiny catch: Debian’s kernels don’t have it enabled (I believe for license reasons). This also means that even if you try to compile an ALSA module for it, it wont work - it will say that your kernel has ALSA support built in already. So - you have to recompile the kernel and enable this specific module to get it working. That really sucks - I know. But, I’ve already done the work for you - and here are the debian packages:

Linux Kernel Image File - 2.6.24.1-etchnhalfwithcs46xx (deb)
Linux Kernel Header File - 2.6.24.1-etchnhalfwithcs46xx (deb)

To install these files, simply copy them to your /usr/src/linux directory and then run the following commands as root:

dpkg -i (image file name)
dpkg -i (header file name)

Then simply reboot and your new kernel will be installed and selected as default in Grub - and you’ll have sound (you’ll also need ALSA installed of course).

Please don’t post linux questions in the comments, as I am fairly new to linux my self and I wont be able to help you. But this is my solution for getting sound to work on a ThinkPad T20 with Debian Etch - results that took me many hours of work to figure out. I hope it helps someone out - even though the T20 is SUPER old!