Florin Andrei wrote : > >From what i've heard, Audigy 1 and 2 are supported by ALSA. > [...] > > I just noticed this morning that they've got updated ALSA packages for > the most recent Red Hat kernel updates. I'll probably try them out this > evening, once i download and install the kernel updates. "They"? :-) > You will need the following packages: [...] I've got a quick documentation over at : http://freshrpms.net/docs/alsa/ > If the /etc/init.d script contained in alsa-utils does not work for you > (there are a few decisions that were made when creating that script > that, to me at least, seem a bit awkward), then you may try out my > version of it: > > http://florin.myip.org/stuff/alsactl > > My script requires S01alsactl symlinks in the 1-through-5 rc*.d runlevel > directories, and K99alsactl symlinks in the 0 and 6 runlevel > directories. Hmmm, in what way is my script awkward? I think it's pretty much useless anyway if you've put the right entries in modules.conf since the sound modules seem to be unloaded upon shutdown and reboot, so the state can be automatically saved then (see my ALSA page). > The main ALSA native utility that you'll probably end up using is > alsamixer, which runs in a regular xterm. Some controls in alsamixer > have funky and non-intuitive names, hopefully you'll figure out what > goes where. One could also go for the nice gtk2 gnome-alsamixer :-) [...] > Some media apps on Freshrpms come with ALSA as a requirement, and they > use ALSA by default, although usually there is a switch to fall back to > OSS emulation, just in case. gxine/xine is one such example. Well, all apps that can have a native ALSA output are compiled with it, as it only adds a dependency on alsa-lib, which is quite small. Even xmame is compiled with native ALSA support! > Strictly from the perspective of the sound subsystem, ALSA is perhaps a > technically better solution than the default OSS drivers. However, if > you're not comfortable with using 3rd party kernel modules on your > system, then maybe that's not the right solution for you. Absolutely. For most users, ALSA isn't worth the effort with the current 2.4 kernels. Hopefully this will change with the 2.6 series... but when, who knows!? > Personally, i use ALSA on every multimedia-enabled Linux desktop that i > control. For me, overall it works better than OSS - i can put to serious > work the Dolby 5.1 digital outputs of my soundcards, the latency of the > sound subsystem is clearly better, the driver itself has more clever > options and is more flexible. > That being said, remember that, strictly speaking, it's still in beta. Hey, no. It's not even in "rc" anymore, it's written "stable" on the website ;-) Matthias -- Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages : http://freshrpms.net/ Raw Hide 20030511 running Linux kernel 2.4.20-13.9 Load : 0.10 0.13 0.20
