Re: debian 2.1r3 needed and release team coordination
"EXT AVS; sharkey@ale.physics.sunysb.edu" wrote:
>
> > > IIRC, there are two different sets of sound devices, OSS ones and ALSA
> > > ones.
> >
> > Are they incompatible?
> >
> > I refer to /dev/sound, /dev/dsp, etc.
>
> I believe so. However, ALSA is available as a separate package, while OSS
> is not. It would be possible to create the OSS devices as part of the
> base install and replace them with the ALSA version if the ALSA packages
> are installed.
>
> Eric
When you compile the ALSA drivers you can set an option that makes the ALSA
drivers OSS-Lite compatible. I am no sound driver expert but we havn't
noticed any incompatibilites with such ALSA drivers. I was forced to install
ALSA drivers on my son's PC since he uses a SB PCI 128 card that couldn't get
sound support any other way. As a test I installed it on my own PC with a
SB 32 pnp card and I got better sound quality with the ALSA driver than the
OSS driver. I was also very impressed by the ALSA configurator script that
autodetects and helps in configuring the soundcard.
I have such good experiences with the ALSA drivers that I suggest that you
don't bother at all with the OSS drivers and instead just use the OSS
compatibility option with the ALSA drivers.
Gunnar
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