On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 08:32:43PM +0100, Balazs Javor wrote: > So? Are there any good documentation available somewhere? > I've been trying to figure this whole issue out myself for > a while but then gave up and moved to more important stuff > for a while, as I'm generally fairly new to Linux and have > a lot of other things to learn as well.
Go to www.alsa-project.org and get the most recent version of the drivers, lib, and utils tar files. The drivers tarball contains installation instructions, including what aliases to add to your /etc/modutils/aliases file. > Generally speaking I'm also confused a lot by the fact that > I've found no indication anywhere why there are 3 different > version numbers available, what's the advantage of one over > another, how exactly to set it up etc... Within Debian or on the alsa-project site? > I also had some interesting kernel messages claiming that I'll > taint my kernel by inserting non-cerified modules, which is not > too promissing, whatever it means... It means very little. It is a minor bug in ALSA that it does not explicitly define a symbol indicating that it is GPL. The kernel thus believes that it must be a proprietary module and marks itself as being tainted by the insertion of proprietary code into itself. Expect ALSA to correct this soon. > And while we're at it, is there somewhere some good documentation > to help people decide whst is the best way to go for a certain > system/soundcard/purpose. I bet that alsa-project.org has some comparison between themselves and OSS. > What's the difference / advantage between ALSA and OSS? ALSA contains an OSS compatibility layer, so you should be able to get the best of both worlds using it. OSS is old and not as well engineered/designed. Last I knew, though, there was a binary-only, commercial version of OSS that allowed a few cards to work in Linux when they otherwise could not. > Some Gnome stuff seems to be adamant on using Esound/esd. > That seems to be conflicting with ALSA, or is it? > And I could go on like that... I don't think there's any reason you can't run esound/esd with ALSA. esd is userspace code, ALSA is the actual kernel driver. esd/esound would have to talk to the kernel level driver at some point, and since ALSA can emulate OSS, there should be no problem even if esound/esd doesn't directly support it. noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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