# CMI8788 Audio Chipset with Fedora/Ubuntu



## OrbitzXT (Oct 27, 2007)

Like I start off every post in the Linux section, I am a complete noob when it comes to this OS, but I have a friend who knows a fair amount and has been using Linux for about a year. He's trying to convert me so I told him to set it up for me and I'll toy around with it. He installed both Fedora and Ubuntu so I could see which I liked better, I preferred Ubuntu 7.10 but we ran into a problem installing the drivers for my sound card, the one in my specs. Both distros actually knew what my sound card was without us doing anything, but neither produced any sound.

He installed the ALSA drivers but ultimately could not get it to work. It seems everytime I'm willing to be converted from Windows to Linux, something goes wrong that scares me back to XP for another few months. We both did a lot of googling to find a solution and get sound working, but no luck. If anyone has any experience with this chipset and getting it to work on Linux I'd love to hear it.


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## b1lk1 (Oct 27, 2007)

That chipset doesn't work under Linux yet.  I run Kubuntu and had to sidestep that soundcard for the onboard sound.


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## OrbitzXT (Oct 27, 2007)

How long does it usually take for an unsupported piece of hardware to become supported? Its a fairly popular card, I imagine there are people demanding driver support for it.


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## AddSub (Oct 27, 2007)

> How long does it usually take for an unsupported piece of hardware to become supported?



Support could be added tomorrow, a year from now, or never. That's linux for ya. I wouldn't be too hopeful. You should keep your eye on  http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html  since you can find out about any experimental patches as soon as they come out. 

 One of my old add-on cards had a pretty common VT6421 disk controller from VIA. At the time I bought it, it was 2 years old. There was no working driver/patch for it under Linux. Today, I don't even have that card, and the chipset is almost 4 years old, but I do occasionally check the  http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html  to see how the development is going. Guess what? There is still no working driver for that pretty common chipset. VIA itself released a driver for it, but it does not work.

Another example: I have three printers. Oldest one is a 10 year old Canon inkjet, new one is only few months old and is high quality photo printer. Third one is few years old. None of them have working drivers for linux. Nuff said.


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## OrbitzXT (Oct 29, 2007)

Does the popularity of a product have any effect on the support for it? The CMI8788 chipset seems to be the popular alternative to those fed up with Creative, and it does sound great on both XP and Vista with the optical out.


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## Deleted member 3 (Oct 29, 2007)

OrbitzXT said:


> Does the popularity of a product have any effect on the support for it? The CMI8788 chipset seems to be the popular alternative to those fed up with Creative, and it does sound great on both XP and Vista with the optical out.



A lot actually, popular products often get more driverupdates and such as there is more demand for it. Plus there is more money to do so (higher sales).
Besides, there is a bigger fanbase which helps a lot too.


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## Dandel (Oct 31, 2007)

the CMI8788 chipset has support for linux right now... but it lacks DTS and a few other of the DSP functions... just search for linux on the product page. and if you need prof of this, just check out the Phoronix article over this.

only note is that the phoronix article states that you need alsa version 1.0.15 to use the CMI8788 chipset.


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