> One unanswered question: in what situation is it recommended to try out > this oss thingy?
ALSA does not support your hardware. ALSA has latency or quality issues for you. You want to use an application that has no native way to use ALSA, and the ALSA OSS emulation is not really suitable. You just want to try something different. > I mean the version number v4.2_build2003 suggests that > we're dealing with software which is unmaintained since 7 years. The source I am using was actually released in 2010. 2003 is merely the current build number. > These > are the disadvantages. What are the advantages? My observations or information I have found through google: ALSA and OSSv4 cannot coexist as modules simultaneously. I've seen user reports that the sound quality from OSSv4 is better than ALSA for them. It seems to make a difference for me as well. But to really notice a difference, you have to set 'vmix0-src' to High. This can be done if you use ossxmix. Reportedly, ALSA supports hardware OSSv4 does not and OSSv4 supports hardware that ALSA does not, however I have not found anything to compare their hardware support. Fairly painless to setup (if your hardware is supported), but getting applications to use OSS varies in complexity. Generally OSS support is easy to find because it is also available on other unix systems (Linux, Solaris, BSD, BeOS, etc.). For DEs, you will need to find a way to set the sound backend to OSS if you use a sound server like phonon or pulseaudio. I would have to monkey around with this to write documentation on how to set this up. Still, not very hard to setup. I did not need to modify any system level configuration manually. Ultimately, I wanted to package OSSv4 to provide an alternative to ALSA for users not satisfied with ALSA. I felt extending Frugalware's support would help encourage more people to try/use Frugalware. _______________________________________________ Frugalware-devel mailing list [email protected] http://frugalware.org/mailman/listinfo/frugalware-devel
