Re: OSS4

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

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 05:08, Jan Willem Stumpel<jstumpel@planet.nl> wrote:
> I just read this:
>
> http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html
>
> AFAICU the article recommends throwing out, among other things,
> ALSA and pulseaudio, which it has harsh words for, and using OSS
> version 4 instead.>
> Switching everything to OSS4 with its (alleged) built-in sound
> mixing seems very attractive.
>
> Does Debian support OSS Version 4 now? Is there a decent Debian
> sound tutorial somewhere? Using Sid.

If you can compile stuff, you can use OSSv4. There is no particular
support for it in Debian, or any other Distro, AFAIK. I have seen some
Ubuntu OSSv4 articles, and of course the info on the wiki and forums
at opensound.com. Also the #oss IRC channel on freenode, and the
some of the guys on #xmms2 also seem to know a lot about OSSv4
on Linux.

I have been thinking about trying this myself, as there do seem to be
many advantages to OSSv4.  But unless there is a lot of adoption by
end users that can do it themselves, followed by them demanding it
in there distros, it will never have any chance (not much chance even
if that happens). There are currently only two main maintainers of OSS,
the code would need lots of clean up to go into the mainline kernel,
there is general resistance to it from many kernel devs, and there is
apparently some ambiguity about the licence.


Cheers,
Kelly Clowers