OpenSolaris HOWTO - Intel audiohd driver + gstreamer mp3 support

Here's the first in the Adventures in OpenSolaris series about my migration from Gentoo Linux over to OpenSolaris.. As any developer will attest having some background music helps take the edge off things..

Well.. unfortunately the audiohd driver for Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller is one of them. (This applies to both the Dell M2300 and M4300)

I started by trying the audiohd trial driver [1] which didn't work.. (Sorry didn't save the dmesg output)

The only thing this successfully did was annoy me by enabling the beep when you press backspace and various other things like bash auto complete.. *joy* (Who decided that was sane?) I guess this is progress right?

In another blog that mentioned the audiohd driver they said something about OSS drivers from 4Front Technologies so Googling around brought me to [2] which with a slight file name change ended up working in seconds..

As root you'll need to do something similar to.

# wget http://www.4front-tech.com/release/oss-solaris-v4.0-1016-i386.pkg
# pkgadd -d oss-solaris-v4.0-1016-i386.pkg

And to test to make sure things are working

# osstest

You may have to logout/login to have the volume applet pick up the changes.. Possibly also either killing the applet daemon or restarting gnome-panels do the trick..
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After having a working sound card I want to get back to what I originally wanted in the first playing.. Playing a mp3 or stream [3] in rhythmbox... Manually copied my favourite audio stream and added it as a new internet radio station.. One eager double click later and welcome to...

Rhythmbox-Message: Missing plugin: gstreamer|0.10|rhythmbox|MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3) decoder|decoder-audio/mpeg, mpegversion=(int)1, layer=(int)3
Rhythmbox-Message: Automatic missing codec installation not supported (helper script missing)
Segmentation Fault (core dumped)

While I wish this would have been handled a little more gracefully it at least tells me pretty clearly what the last part is missing.. (No I don't mean the world having already switched over to OGG format..)

So the last part of this little adventure will be getting the mp3 support in rhythmbox...  With that we can listen to music and hopefully get back to /work/..

In a comment at this entry [4] it explains that there's currently a few imperfect solutions to getting mp3 support... I only tested the first and it worked for me.

So go head on over to fluendo shop [5] and get the free mp3 gstreamer codec..

If you're too lazy to read the README..

# tar xvfj fluendo-mp3-4.solaris-intel.tar.bz2
# mkdir -p ~/.gstreamer-0.10/plugins; cp ./codecs/* ~/.gstreamer-0.10/plugins/

and now finally go enjoy your music..

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/sming56/entry/audiohd_driver_trial
[2] http://iswandi.blogs.yarsi.ac.id/2008/07/04/install-driver-sound-card-intel-di-opensolaris/
[3] http://www.di.fm/
[4] http://blogs.sun.com/pengyang/entry/four_opensolaris_songbirds
[5] http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/fluendo-mp3-decoder/

Comments

[z0mbix]

Many Thanks, this saved me some time working it out myself.

Cheers z0mbix

[mateusz]

Ive just started using opensolaris, your article was veeery useful. thank you!