Grant wrote:
>>>Ah, maybe I should have set the alsa USE flag? If I do that though,
>>>it wants to install alsa-headers, alsa-driver, and alsa-lib as
>>>dependencies. I've read it's a bad idea to install alsa-driver if
>>>your support is in the kernel.
>>
>>Only if you want ALSA support in. In the drop-down box where the
>>Audio plugins are, do you see anything besides the Disk Writer plugin?
>> If not, then check to see if you have oss in your USE flags, and if
>>not, try adding it and emerge xmms again.
>>
>>--
>>Ed
>
>
> I thought alsa and oss had more to do with getting sound to work with
> a system than with getting sound to work with a particular
> application. I thought that if sound was working via the kernel, alsa
> or oss wasn't necessary. If alsa/oss is necessary to get sound to
> work with xmms, how can sound work with xmovie without either? Is it
> just up to the application?
>
> - Grant
>
I think you are confusing the relationship of the ALSA packages to the
kernel.
If you are using the 2.4-series kernel, the included kernel drivers
(Device Drivers=>Sound) are the OSS drivers. If you wanted the ALSA
drivers under a 2.4-series kernel, you have/had to install an outside
package to get them.
If you are using the 2.6-series kernel, the included kernel drivers are
the ALSA drivers (the OSS drivers are also available, but deprecated,
and the default enabled drivers are the ALSA drivers). Meaning that they
are the same driver modules that would be compiled against the kernel if
you installed the alsa-drivers package (version does play a role here,
though, given that the 2.6 kernel drivers are like 1.04, and you can
patch to or install alsa-driver 1.06).
The kernel drivers are not "something else than" ALSA or OSS-- they ARE
ALSA or OSS. However, they are literally *just* the drivers; any
additional utilities that might be necessary (mixers, libraries,
headers, etc) must be installed separately.
And you often do have to tell the applications that need to utilize the
sound device which protocol you are using. Although, if you are using
ALSA from the kernel, and have also compiled OSS emulation, it often
isn't a problem because the application can just use whatever it finds
most comfortable for it. But some applications haven't really improved
their detection, or don't work well with ALSA, or don't work well with
ALSA > 1.0, so sometimes you still have to manually configure the
application yourself. This is also something to watch out for when you
use udev, because some applications don't detect the device nodes
properly (or at all, they just guess based on what the nodes used to be
a year and a half ago under devfs), and you have to configure those
manually, too.
Holly
--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list