Re: Alsa in Debian Sarge? How to?
On Sun, 05 Sep 2004 20:10:08 +0200, Pascal Bonesh wrote:
> apt-get alsa-base alsa-headers alsa-oss alsa-utils alsaplayer
> alsaplayer-alsa alsaplayer-common alsaplayer-gtk alsaplayer-oss
You don't need alsa-headers unless you are a developer. You
don't need alsa-oss unless you want to use ALSA's OSS
compatibility drivers.
The alsaplayer* packages are rather irrelevant here; they are
components of the ALSA music player and not of the ALSA drivers.
> On my debian sarge with 2.6.7-1-686 Standard Kernel.
>
> I don't know, I expected apt to ask me to remove oss or configure alsa,
> so that all apps use it instead of oss.
There are no OSS packages per se, although there are quite a
few packages that are written to the OSS API. For these to
work you need drivers that support that API -- either the
OSS drivers themselves or the ALSA OSS-compatibility drivers.
> I tried xmms with the alsa output plugin: it didn't work.
A common reason for ALSA seeming to fail to work after it
is first installed is that all the output levels are set
to zero. Install gamix and see if you can increase the
levels above zero.
> I googled a bit and found that you may have to do some more things
> like: add the following in /etc/modutils/aliases
You are using Linux 2.6 so /etc/modutils/ is not used. The
relevant directory for you is /etc/modprobe.d/ but you shouldn't
need to put anything in there other than /etc/modprobe.d/alsa
which is included in alsa-base.
> I rebooted (just to be on the save side) and started Gnome, I again
> tried to run XMMS with the alsa output plugin, but it didn't work.
> Nevertheless the OSS ouput plugin still works.
Are you sure that the OSS drivers are not loaded? Check
by running lsmod.
> Probably I still have oss running and that prevents alsa from doing it's
> job, but I don't know how to go on from here: how do I disable OSS, how
> enable alsa properly? What is the right way to install alsa on debian
> anyway?
If the problem is that OSS modules are loading then you need
to configure whatever is loading them so that they don't do that.
Discover and hotplug are the usual culprits.
A quick hack is to move the OSS drivers out of
/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/sound to some location
where the module loader won't find them.
--
Thomas Hood
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