Re: sound problems

[Bruce Smith <bruce@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >>Bruce and I have both chucked the "improved" OSS support and gone to ALSA,...
> >>Heck, THIS machine (look at the header) is still on 2.0.30, like RH FOUR 
> >>POINT TWO (not for long!).
> >If you don't need full-duplex, then OSS is fine.  (and a lot easier! :)
> >For normal sound, I can't tell any difference in quality between ALSA & OSS.
>
> I don't think ALSA is "harder"; it was simply harder to understand some
> of the things the developers were suggesting, mostly because English is hardly
> their native language. I'm doing something about that now by writing better
> documentation for ALSA, at on the install/configure side.

Alsa is "harder" because Redhat 5.2 comes with an improved version of
the program "sndconfig" that does all the setup work for you with the
OSS drivers.  It also probes most sound cards, and for non-standard 
setups, it lets you "trial & error" try out different drivers, ports 
and IRQ's until you get the sound card working.

There is nothing like that for ALSA (AFAIK), so you must configure
the modules & parameters manually.  That's definitely harder.

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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