I gave up, and decided to recompile the kernel last night.

First I tried again to tune the guitar, but even with the cord out a bit, it still didn't work, nor after using the JACK gui, to setup the patching.

(I kept getting the error "jack_create_thread: error 1 setting scheduler parameters after thread creation: Operation not permitted" when trying to start JACK with qjackctl too, I had to disable the "realtime" option to fix this).

Anyway, so I decided to recompile the kernel. I knew this would be a bit of a pain, because I'd have to recompile the wireless drivers, and a few other bits and pieces that have to be done independently.

I downloaded the latest kernel source, 2.6.12.5, (which I discovered I could get as "free" traffic, from the pacific.net mirror). When I tried to unbzip the source, there was some sort of an error, like the file was incomplete or corrupt.

There's another mirror I have access to as "free" traffic, 3FL, so I went to download it from there, but found they didn't have 2.6.12.5 yet, only up to 2.6.12.4.

I checked the changelog, and it looked like bugger all changes that would effect me, so I pulled down 2.6.12.4.

While going through the kernel configuration, I decided to add in moduled support for a whole bunch of stuff, "just in case", so I should be able to attach any sort of PCMCIA card, or USB device, and have support for it.

While I was going through configuring, I came across the DRI support. Bugger, I'd forgot about this pain.

I knew that after I built the kernel, I'd have to build the standalone DRI/DRM stuff against it, so that Xorg would run with direct rendering. Oh well.

I finished compiling the kernel, with all the options I thought I needed. (Though forgetting to look for the realtime support, which was one of the reasons I was doing this, so JACK could run realtime).

I installed it, rebooted, and the machine came up, nice. I had no wireless, I built the ieee subsystem for it, and installed it, then built the ipw2200 driver, and installed that, and loaded it, and my wireless popped straight up.

Now I had to work on DRI. I read the instructions for building it, and started following them. I had to check some stuff out of CVS.

I started checking out xc, and then I recalled what happened last time I did this.. it ended up being 700 something Mb worth of files, taking me a day to download, when I could have been just a 42mb bzip file.

I killed that off, and just grabbed out drm, and mesa.

I built the drm kernel modules, and installed them, and was able to load up the module for my i915 chipset, worked.

I tried to build Mesa, but it complained about missing files. I recalled needing to have the xc module also available, and manually copying a few files out of xc into Mesa, for it to compile.

I tried it without, hoping the existing mesa stuff/xorg modules would work with the kernel driver.

I tried restarting Xorg, but didn't get direct rendering. I recalled doing this before, and it wasn't until I rebooted that it started working, so I rebooted, still no direct rendering.

I checked, and the kernel modules weren't loaded. Strange, maybe I didn't "depmod -a", I did that, and rebooted again, still didn't load.

I put a reference to i915 in the modules file, to force it loading, but this still didn't work. I figured it's because I've got mismatching versions of the kernel module, and the Xorg module.

Other than having no direct rendering, it all seemed to work.

I went about testing the sound stuff, and found exactly the same behaviour as before. I can plug the guitar into the line in, and hear it out the speakers on the laptop, but no software can see the signal.

(I went through all the software, and none of it worked, same as before).

I gave up, shut the lid, and went to bed.

In the morning, the machine was still running fine, I used it for a while, and then shut the lid again.

When I came back again, my mouse was gone. It would still work, because buttons would react to the cursor hovering over them, but the mouse pointer was gone.

I had to reboot to get it back again.

Now I'm in 2 minds, since the audio stuff didn't work, do I just roll back to the old kernel (and lose all the extra kernel modules I built, for stuff I don't have), or try to recompile Mesa/xorg to get the direct rendering back again.

Neither of which will effect the busted audio support (gnome sound recorder still hangs, under the new kernel), and it might just be a waste of time.

Update: I've just tested watching a couple of video clips that are hanging around on my laptop, and even though I've not got direct rendering, they still played fine. I intend to download the latest xorg CVS tarball, and build it, and mesa, but I haven't got around to it.