In the event that anyone decides to use a junked iBook in a Linux environment, I’m hoping that this article might save someone a lot of experimentation.

The Problem:
Started having trouble getting packet information through Soundmodem after a system upgrade to Kernel version 2.6.36-gentoo-r8. I began to investigate the sound card using Audacity then arecord/aplay to see if audio was even getting through ALSA into the external USB audio interface (snd-usb-audio). The audio was almost unintelligible through the distortion and crackling. After some playing around, I realized that audio recorded through the internal card (snd-powermac) was fine but USB audio was crap. The iBook conveniently has no TRS inputs. Therefore, I’m required to use USB.

The Solution:
I opted to upgrade the kernel from scratch. I disabled the EHCI (USB 2.0) support in the kernel since the iBook has no USB 2.0 support. Secondly (and this is where I think the problem really stemmed from), I enabled both the Big Endian/Little Endian option for the OHCI (USB 1.1) driver after reading about Endianness.

My /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf file looks something like this:

alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss
alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore

options snd cards_limit=1

# ALSA portion
alias snd-card-0 snd-usb-audio
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
options snd-usb-audio nrpacks=1 index=0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/dsp snd-usb-oss