Re: Installing alsa?
If it ain't broke, you'll probably save yourself some trouble by not
fixing it. But if you want or need to build ALSA, I've got it running
and *perhaps* can explain what's going on. I'm not sure I remember
what I did or have this right, but perhaps someone can correct any
errors.
To use alsa you have to build the low level drivers from source. Most
of the debs are higher level things; they will work fine once you have
the driver set up.
To do that you should get the package alsa-source. This puts a
tarball in /usr/src for alsa-driver. You need to unpack that
somewhere and build it; this will require the kernel-source (perhaps
you can get away with headers only, but I haven't tried).
In the kernel you need to enable sound but disable all the specific
drivers as I recall (see the docs with alsa-source). If you use
make-kpkg you can build the kernel and the modules.
When you make the modules you get an alsa-modules deb, which you can
then install to get the loadable module. There is various stuff that
needs to be tweaked for everything to work, but I think the latest
stuff from alsa-source builds a deb which does most of this for you.
Finally, I found I needed to build alsa-utils from source to get a
version compatible with my drivers. You need this because it has a
program that activates the sound, which is off by default.
I have a woody system, but used the sid source for these exercises
(which may explain why I needed to build alsa-utils from source too).
It's pretty useful to be able to build your own kernel and modules,
even though it takes a little getting used to. Then when other tweaks
come along that you need (e.g., lm-sensors and getting an ATAPI drive
to work with cdrecord) you'll be ready.
On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 05:52:04PM +0200, Julio Merino wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm wondering about switching to ALSA. I'm currently using
> OSS with a SB16 isapnp.
>
> So, which will be the "debian" way to go with it? I see
> dozens of packages about alsa... alsa-base, alsa-sources...
> Which ones should I install?
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> FreeBSD is the power--
> Julio Merino <juli@merino.net> ICQ: 18961975
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