Where is my hardware?!?

[crau2]

I got a Dell Inspiron 1521 from an internship I did, and I wanted to turn it into a slick Kubuntu machine, however I'm beginning to think Dell sees open source as open sores. Thankfully I didn't pay for this paperweight, but I'd still like to get it running. I've managed to get everything working but the sound and the wifi. Is there anyone out there that has managed to fix these?

The sound is SIGMATEL STAC 92XX C-Major HD Audio which alsa won't recognize,
and the wifi is Dell's 1505 802.11n DRAFT WLAN Mini-card.

I've already tried ndiswrapper and updating ALSA to no avail.

Can anyone help me?

Thanks.

[Snowhog]

Re: Where is my hardware?!?

Laptop, yes? Sound not working on laptops is an all to common problem. And as there are many reasons for it, so to are there many approaches to getting it (re)solved.

The easiest thing to try (first) is to add acpi=off to kernel line of /boot/grub/menu.lst
Open a konsole and type:

kdesu kate /boot/grub/menu.lst

Locate the first kernel line after ## ## End Default Options ##
Add acpi=off to the end of this line. Save the file, exit the konsole, shutdown and restart. See if this doesn't get sound working. No guarantee it will work, but it won't hurt if it does not.

Post back the results.

[crau2]

Re: Where is my hardware?!?

Hey, thanks for the help, but turning acpi off caused the system to fail to boot. I had use recovery mode to fix it. Any other suggestions?