Humility is mine. This evening, I decided to tackle the sound mixer issue. Compiled the cvs snapshot driver I had downloaded over Jaeger's line. Followed the installation instructions, or actions I knew to be equivilant thereof.

New driver modules installed, I tried opening up the mixer. Holy cow, was this thing ever wide compared to what I was used to! Channel after channel of input. I felt like starting a miniature recording studio right here in the basement. (Of course, most of them don't have any feed. Yet. ;) I'm gonna have to investigate the possibility of wiring my DVD player's digital out into this thing.)

So, I decided to try doing what I had been unable to before: Insert a cd into the drive, play it, and see if I could get it to produce any sound. I did so. Tried adjusting the cd channl. Nothing.

Checked all the channels. Tried turning everything up and down. Still no luck. I tried plugging my portable player into the line in, and tried adjusting that. No sound. I knew the mixer itself was working, because I could play an mp3, and adjust the PCM and main levels just fine. How odd.

[Repeat the above two paragraphs about 5 or 6 times, with slight variations each.] Oh, and I also tried to recompile and reinstall the driver. No avail.

Then, a faint memory of something I had read while browsing the web at Jaeger's house struck me. Intrigued by the thought, I went to Argo's now familiar rear end, and tried another tactic. (Oh please, get your minds out of the gutter. I wasn't visiting THOSE kinds of web pages. ;)

I took it out of one hole, and inserted it into the other.

I'm talking about the speaker wire, you perverts!

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Plugged the speakers into the socket directly adjacent to the one they had used. And all at the same time, the sounds of mp3 music (A Beethoven paino concerto), the cd in the drive (Enigma -- The Screen Behind the Mirror), and my portable (Tori Amos -- Winter) were serenading my room simultaniously. Never have I heard such a glorious sound!

My mistake: Plugging my only speakers into the jack meant for rear output. (What is it with this rambling and rears, anyway?) I needed the front output, since I was attempting to merely play 2-channel data. (I guess my mp3 player must be smart enough to expand the signal to use rear channels automatically.)

So anyway, now THAT all works, and I'm happy.

I also discovered that the kernel patch I had applied for my GL in actuality hadn't done diddly squat. I tried rebooting with Mandrake's default kernel (all part of the effort to make testing my sound drivers as simple as possible), ran my GL tests, and they were just the same as before. (Meaning: hardware accellerated, beautiful as heaven, and buggy as hell.)

So obviously, all that rigamarole with getting AGP DMA transfers turned out to be nothing. But who was I to know the difference? According to the docs, it's not strictly necessary to use the AGP DMA features, but it does aid performance greatly. Guess this means I can look forward to even more speedy rendering in the future, when I actually do get it working. :)

Meanwhile, with the drivers I'm using (the rpm snapshot from March), Blender's menu's show up as totally invisible, but I know they're there, cause the mouse cursor changes, and I can manipulate them with the keyboard. Doh!

Once I get a net connection again, I'm gonna be all over that cvs source code, trying to get it to work right. Upgrade to the kernel 2.4 test versions, so I can quit applying all these back patches, and just use the bleeding edge drivers out of the main tree. Then.... Compile XFree86 4.0. Mwahahahahaha!

--

Woke up this morning, feeling like a total pile of hammered shit, a sensation which lingered throughout the day. (my spirits had picked up significantly after I got my sound working right. :)

I got out of bed with a mild sore throat. I could feel it beginning to come on yesterday, but I had hoped it would just go away. Didn't happen. Nothing drastic enough to be calling in sick about, but just bad enough to make a cube dweller wonder, "Was it really worth getting up at all today?"

My throat actually has improved since this morning, so I think I'm on the right track. Probably caused by all those blasted nacho chips and cheese sauce I consumed during the fest. And of course, every geek knows that sleep deprivation has never been known to cause detrimental effects to one's health. ;)

Took a huge nap after work. Woke up. Did the tinkering thing. Rambled. Duh.

I think I'll now try some more of that "sleep" thing.