Using Gentoo, one is expected to be rather capable of compiling and configuring a linux kernel. Side effects include 1) a Gentoo user is therefore able to optimise a system for his/her hardware, and 2) the Gentoo Linux Distribution becomes one of the geekiest available. (trumped only by LFS). So there I was, poking around my list of packages when I noticed bah! I’m two revisions out of date. I woosh off in all glory to my /usr/src/linux, make menuconfig, zoom around enabling drivers and removing unnecessary crud (seriously, I thought reiserfs was dead? Even worse, it assumes I want OSS instead of ALSA?). Some minutes later, I save my configuration, quit, and compile make && make modules_install. Baah-dum-bah-bee. Flawless compile. Copy the bzImage to my /boot, (whoah, I’ve got a lot of old kernel builds there – I should remove them), name it something intelligent (like kernel-2.6.25-gentoo-r9), add a new entry into my grub.conf to boot to r9 as well as r7, then type in the magic word: “reboot”.

Oh, wait! – you say, where is the problem? No problem! (or so I thought) No kernel panics, no nothing fancy, no forgetting to add filesystem support … so I punch up startx, ratpoison, KDE loads, start surfing the web, chatting on Kopete, grooving along to my … wait, what? NO MUSIC? Panic. I check my mpc. It’s playing. I check my mpd, it’s on. Check alsamixer and whooooop-what? No alsamixer? Not good. Oh wait I said, I remember I removed it from runlevel to speed up boot-time. So I /etc/init.d/alsasound start. and then catastrophe strikes! No drivers detected?

Rush back to my kernel menuconfig, Device Drivers -> Sound -> ALSA (check OSS is disabled) -> PCI Devices -> hmm… Yes, I do have Intel/SiS/nVidia/AMD/ALi AC97 Controller enabled. Time to double check if that’s the right one. Read the doc on it, and yep – it’s snd-intel8x0 for sure. Perhaps it’s a module problem? Modprobe snd-intel8x0 gives me FATAL: NO MODULES FOUND. Oh no!

— Cut: I thought I could turn a very geeky issue into a dramatic story but apparently I was wrong —

Ok. So I ended up having to unmask alsa-driver and alsa-headers, then dump ALSA_CARDS=”intel8x0″ into my etc/make.conf, then emerge alsa-driver. How silly, in my opinion, that I should require a non-supported package after a kernel upgrade. I’ve sent the alsa-bugs guys an email asking them what’s going on, and hopefully I’ll get an answer soon about why the in-kernel driver no longer likes my computer.

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