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Hello everyone, I have recently switched to Debian from Mandrake, and configuring almost everything takes an effort. The biggest problem though, seemed to be my soundcard, which could not be recognized. It's an integrated Realtek 650 AC 97. I apt-get the alsa files, but alsaconf couldn't detect anything. Finally I found the oss website and that worked. I just would like to know how they differ and what is the difference between them. Also why is alsa so popular and oss is getting rid of? Thanx for the questions in advance.
ALSA is the new kernel interface for sound. OSS (old way) was not easily extended and had a poor API so they switched to ALSA.
Does that mean that I could use the alsa project and it should still work? Is it backwards compatible with oss? I'd rather use alsa since it's newer but only oss works for me.
bwkaz
05-23-2005, 09:31 PM
I believe Alsa supports all the same cards as OSS did. But they are developed by two different groups, so it is possible that the OSS people had access to something that the Alsa people didn't. And I don't know for sure, either.
Perhaps a look at www.alsa-project.org and a search there for your sound card's chipset (as reported by /sbin/lspci, the program to list PCI devices ;)) would help?
Well, through oss I found out exactly which module it needs to load for the sound to work. In modconf, I have that similar module under i810_audio, however it does not want to load. It says "init_module: No such device". It says that there might be an incorrect IRQ or IO parameter. Is there a way to fix it or would I have to recompile a kernel? I'd like to get this to work so I can use the native Debian modules rather than third party software.
bwkaz
05-24-2005, 07:12 PM
i810_audio is an OSS driver. The Alsa driver for Intel 810 compatible chipsets (which is what i810_audio drives) is snd-intel8x0.
Try that module, if you haven't. (I have no idea what this modconf thingy is. ;))
"No such device" errors are sometimes caused by shared IRQs, but more often it's an incompatibility with the system's "PnP OS" setting in the BIOS. If you've tried modprobe'ing snd-intel8x0, then try turning that setting off (it may be called something different though). That sometimes helps.
The exact reason really depends on the driver, but it's often that the driver can't see the card that it's supposed to be driving. If "PnP OS" is on, then the BIOS will not initialize non-critical devices (like the sound card) at boot time, and the OS is supposed to do that. It's usually better to have the BIOS initialize everything (which means that setting off).
... Is this an onboard sound card? nForce-chipset motherboard perhaps?
CoffeeMan
05-24-2005, 07:38 PM
you could install alsa-oss - ALSA wrapper for OSS applications
Icarus
05-24-2005, 08:26 PM
Originally posted by CoffeeMan
you could install alsa-oss - ALSA wrapper for OSS applications Which is useless if you were to setup ALSA properly with OSS support in the first place
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