Continuing ALSA suckage
Dear God^Wall
does anyone have a working alsa (Debian packages) in Woody
with a recent kernel? Does anyone know how alsa is supposed
to be set up in Woody?
<RANT>
I've finally upgraded the kernel (to 2.4.17) and tried to
use Debian ALSA packages (again). Not entirely unexpectedly,
ALSA broke. Hmm, lessee...
1. there are three alsa-source & utils packages: plain, 0.4,
and 0.5. There's alsautils (in addition to 3 alsa-utils
above), 2 alsaconfs, and a bunch of alsalib's that appear
in "dpkg -l" output but not in aptitude's package list.
Which of them do I need? Is it documented anywhere?
2. I have /etc/init.d/alsa, /etc/init.d/alsasound (not
referenced in /etc/rc?.d's), and /etc/init.d/alsa has a
". /usr/share/alsa-base/snd-dev-utils". (Like, what?
Can you say "NFS server is down"?)
3. There's /etc/alsa/modutils/0.5 (no, alsa-*-0.5 is not
installed) and /etc/alsa/modutils/0.9. Both files seem
to be generated by alsaconf; according to barfs from
modprobe, both contain invalid options (I've a feeling
the driver reads its options from someplace else entirely,
though).
4. There are alsa aliases in both /etc/modules.conf and
/etc/alsa/modutils/*. Well, at leas they seem to be
consitent (I didn't look too closely, though).
5. To quote /usr/share/doc/alsa-base/README.Debian:
* If you are using the kernel with devfs support, you need
to enable the feature and mount it under /dev
Huh? What feature? Enable where? How do I mount "it"?
What does /usr/share/alsa-base/snd-dev-utils do, then,
if not manage alsa sound devices?
I can roll my own alsa setup, thankyouverymuch. (In fact, that's
what I had working before this upgrade.) Should I purge all this
alsa crap and go back to the Good Old Way? I'd rather keep Debian
configuration & startup files & keep package database happy. Is
there any fine manual I can read to find out how to do that?
</RANT>
Ok, I've exaggerated in some places, and I know that a lot of
alsa suckage comes from upstream etc., but still... no need to
add more suckage, is there?
Dima
--
We're sysadmins. Sanity happens to other people. -- Chris King
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