ALSA 0.9

["David A. Greene" <greened@eecs.umich.edu>]

[Sent to debian-devel because I think the alsaconf package
 needs to be updated and probably the install messages
 produced by the build/install of alsa-source.]

I'm trying to get the ESS Maestro3 in my laptop (Dell Latitude
CPx/J) working, so I built modules from the Debian alsa-source
package (0.9+0beta4-5).  I'm running testing so I pulled the
unstable alsa-utils (0.9.0beta4-1).  Ok, so the versions don't
exactly match.  Is this a problem?  They installed ok.

I can modprobe snd-card-maestro3 just fine and even got
the autoloader to work.  Most everything in /proc/asound looks
good.  I created the /dev/snd devices with snddevices in the
module source directory, added what I think are the appropriate
entries in /etc/modutils/aliases (including OSS support) and
ran update-modules.

Problem is, when I cat /proc/asound/sndstat I get:

Sound Driver:3.8.1a-980706 (ALSA v0.9.0beta4 emulation code)
Kernel: Linux waller 2.4.5 #1 Wed Jun 20 11:19:45 EDT 2001 i686
Config options: 0

Installed drivers:
Type 10: ALSA emulation

Card config:
ESS Maestro3 PCI at 0xd800, irq -1

Audio devices:
0: Maestro3 (DUPLEX)

Synth devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG

Midi devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG

Timers:
7: system timer

Mixers:
0: mixer00

So the card is definitely detected but some (OSS?) devices
aren't enabled (MIDI and synth).  lsmod looks like this
(relevant portions only):

Module                  Size  Used by
snd-seq                41472   0
snd-seq-device          4272   0  [snd-seq]
snd-pcm-oss            37088   0  (autoclean)
snd-mixer-oss           9344   0  (autoclean) [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-card-maestro3      12624   0
snd-pcm                47456   0  [snd-pcm-oss snd-card-maestro3]
snd-timer               9472   0  [snd-seq snd-pcm]
snd-ac97-codec         23200   0  [snd-card-maestro3]
snd                    25888   1  [snd-seq snd-seq-device snd-pcm-oss 
snd-mixer-oss snd-card-maestro3 snd-pcm snd-timer snd-ac97-codec]
soundcore               3856   2  [snd]

It looks like things are mostly there, except I get this from amixer:

>>-waller-> amixer
amixer: Mixer attach hw:0 error: No such file or directory

I am stumped.  There's an empty /etc/alsa/0.9 directory.  According
to the information when I installed the Debian package, this is
supposed to contain an ALSA config file, and alsaconf is supposed
to help with that.  Unfortunately, alsaconf is outdated and
doesn't know about the Maestro3.  The ALSA docs don't mention
any sort of config file from what I can tell.  I cobbled together
the necessary module alias information from the source INSTALL
file (commented entries were things noted on the ALSA web page
mini-HOWTO -- I think it's out of date WRT 0.9):

# ALSA modules
alias char-major-116 snd
#alias snd-minor-oss-0 snd-card-maestro3
#alias snd-minor-oss-3 snd-pcm-oss
#alias snd-minor-oss-4 snd-pcm-oss
#alias snd-minor-oss-5 snd-pcm-oss
#alias snd-minor-oss-12 snd-pcm-oss
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-maestro3
options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=1

# OSS/Free setup
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-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

Help!

Thanks.

                                  -Dave

--
"Some little people have music in them, but Fats, he was all music,
   and you know how big he was."  --  James P. Johnson