alo@purdue.edu wrote:
ok, I've installed ALSA and attempted to run through it, but where I get really confused is where you have to edit modules.conf. I guess I'm a bit intimidated by the lines that say "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE!" I wrote in the following lines: # ALSA portion alias char-major-116 snd alias snd-card-0 snd-via686a # OSS/Free portion alias char-major-14 soundcore alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
I've never quite gotten the hang of modules, but here's my understanding.On other distros, you'd edit /etc/modules.conf. On Debian, you edit files in /etc/modules, then run "update-modules" to update /etc/modules.conf (you may also need to run "depmod" to let the system calculate which modules are dependent on which other modules and the order they need to load). In this manner, Debian's apt automation doesn't clobber what you manually put in the modules.conf file.
So instead of putting these lines in /etc/modules.conf, put them in /etc/modutils/alias. Then run "update-modules". You can then look in /etc/modules.conf to see that these lines actually made it over.
If you do an "ls -l /dev/", you'll see *lots* of files fly by. In the two columns between the group column and the date column you'll see some numbers, like 116,3 or 14,8. These are the major and minor numbers of the device. The ALSA sound device expects to have a major number of 116. So I believe what is happening in the lines added to /etc/modules.conf is that a "nickname" is being established for the character device (first column in above listing starts with "c" - "b" for block devices like hard drives, etc) with a major number of 116. This "nickname" is "snd", so that when the system refers to "snd", it's really referring to the character device with a major number of 116.
The character device with a major number of 14 is nicknamed "soundcore", and is apparently how the OSS emulation of ALSA finds its sound device.
Another piece that ALSA needs to find is the "snd-card-0" (first sound card in the system), which is nicknamed "snd-via686a".
After getting these lines into /etc/modules.conf, you can then use the command "modprobe snd-via686a". Before doing so, do an "lsmod" to see what modules are currently listed. After doing the modprobe command, do "lsmod" again to see that not only did the snd-via686a module load, it loaded other modules that it's dependent on (becuase the "depmod" command earlier calculated those dependencies).
I may have a world of misunderstanding in this explanation, but I believe it's approximately correct. List members, please feel free to correct any mistakes.
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