Re: oss and alsa and audio devices

["Kelly Clowers" <kelly.clowers@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 21:03, H.S. <hs.samix@gmail.com> wrote:
> Kelly Clowers wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:58 PM, H.S. <hs.samix@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Ron Johnson wrote:
>>>> If your machine runs kernel 2.6, it shouldn't have OSS.
>
>>
>> lsmod will list your loaded modules. snd_pcm_oss, snd_mixer_oss,
>> and snd_seq_oss, are all part of the alsa oss emulation.
>
> Yes I have those same ones. dpkg also does not really list any relevant
> *oss* package. However, I discovered I have linux-sound-base which
> appears to provide oss.

I believe that is "provides" in the package dependency sense, and is
for compatibility and because of alsa oss emulation. AFAIK, oss has
no userspace component, so nothing would show up in apt.

> And in KDE's sound configuration gui, one of the
> systems to choose from is OSS.

Probably hardwired, and would show up in any case.

> To me it appears that I do have oss.
> Hence the lack of any useful information from Ron's message where he
> used the word "shouldn't".

I think you do have it, but I doubt it is in use. You could look at
lsmod output and compare it to the modules in
/lib/modules/2.6.xxx/kernel/sound/oss.

>> As far as sound servers, dmix is all well and good, but I have
>> personally never seen it work correctly^W at all. I have seen
>> esd work, but not without crashes and other breakage. I do
>> not even want to talk about arts.
>
> I have aumix, kmix and xmix. I have no idea if all three are required.

Those are mixer/volume control apps. You only need one,
or even just alsamixer

Back to one of your original questions, USB sound devices
should be usb/alsa devices. I do not know much about USB
sound, but I am pretty sure that the Linux striped-down OSSv3
system has no USB support at all (although it might still
show up with alsa oss emu). I would not be surprised if
OSS is completely removed within a year or two, and
maybe even the emu will be removed.


Cheers,
Kelly Clowers