Will oss work on Slackware 14.0?
 

Hi,
I feel a bit of sympathy to the oss sound system. It will be good to have it installed but will it work with new Linux kernel?

Did you try "chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa-oss"?

Uhm, is the question about 14.0 (in which case the answer is obviously yes), or 14.1 (in which case see the answer above)?

My fault. Did not notice that. But how could the OP come to that question? ... completely confused.

OSS should work fine on any version of Slackware. Just make sure you disable ALSA from loading and follow the installation instructions over at SlackBuilds.org for best reference.

Hi,
Thanks to you all for reply. Oss or alsa? Alsa is working fine out of box but I am happy to hear that oss will work too.

OSS4 from SBo, which I am the maintainer of, will work just fine with 14.0. I have not tested it with 14.1, but I see no reason it wouldn't work.

OSS3, which is part of the kernel, works out of the box with 14.0. AFAIK it needs to be enabled explicitly in 14.1 (see post #2). Note that OSS3 has the significant drawback of only being able to play one audio stream at once, while ALSA and OSS4 both do software mixing. On 14.0, I disable OSS3 by commenting out the load_oss_modules lines in rc.alsa.

I use ALSA, but that's only because I use USB soundcards exclusively, and OSS4 doesn't work with USB soundcards. OSS4 is a fine option otherwise. For one thing, it has a much nicer graphical mixer that lets you adjust the volume separately for each application.

This is taken from ArchLinux's Wiki regarding OSSv4

To be honest OSSv4 does have better audio quality and does really unlock some of the potential of your sound card.

The only reason I wasn't using it was that sound did not work on Chrome/Chromium a while back. Anyone know if this has changed?

This really isn't true.

ALSA always has sound mixing for applications that output to ALSA.

Under ALSA, applications that output to OSS and are handled by ALSA's OSS emulation layer do not get sound mixing. The way to deal with that, honestly, is to just disable ALSA's OSS emulation layer. It's disabled by default in 14.1.

i'm aiming for peacuful co-existence of ALSA and OSS applications. I have found two mutually exclusive solutions: either the in-kernel oss compatibility layer, or libaoss via a wrapper script called aoss. The latter is superior in that it provides ALSA mixing capability. Unfortunately I didn't get some ancient 32 bit binaries like quake3 to work with libaoss...

Wrong md5sum for oss source tarball !
 

Well I downloaded oss source tarball using the link on www.slackbuilds.org. But downloaded file has different md5sum
than that listed on www.slackbuilds.org! Can I compile this safely?
This is from www.slackbuilds.org
and this for downloaded file (I've followed provided link)

Okay, I just checked. The md5sum in oss.info is indeed wrong. The SlackBuild is perfectly safe to run.

I've fixed this in the update for oss4-2008, which SBo will release soon.

Thanks! I've already compiled its OK! I've got hard time though trying to set up xmms2 to work with oss.

What's difficult getting xmms2 to support OSS? You just need to have oss support built for it then enable it in .config/xmms2/xmms2.conf

Or:

Not really an issue. Have been running it with OSSv4 for years.

@nhOmega Where did you find this? The man doesn't tell this. Under Slackware 14.0 oss during installation creates a subdir
in /dev. In my computer oss devices are /dev/oss/oss_via/mix0 and /dev/oss/oss_via/pcm0. There are /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer but they are not links to these oss devices. I suspect they are alsa's relicts. I did all settings using CLI xmms2 interface with 'server config' command. The issue is that there is no documentation.

Hmm for me they are linked:
dsp -> dsp0
dsp0 -> /dev/oss/oss_hdaudio0/pcm0

I don't use udev so maybe that helps with retaining this.

As for the xmms2 config settings I've been in #xmms2 freenode chan and before that on another network since ~2005 or so bugging them about stuff(my irc nick is ruskie)(I also maintained the xmms2 build in the distro I was using at the time).

This has been my experience as well. ALSA has been behind in terms of support and sound quality for many years. It has never managed to catch up to the quality of OSS.

There were many sound-related issues for me when Slackware switched to ALSA as the default. Don't get me wrong. ALSA is "good enough" for what I do, and I am not usually bothered enough by its shortcomings to switch back to OSS on a new Slackware installation... but when I do, there are noticeable differences.

You may consider to share with us your knowledge about xmms2. Say, create some more detailed documentation. Still I have no idea how to add a file to playlist in CLI. I know there is 'add' command but I don't understand these concepts of 'pattern' versus 'file path'. Say when I'm doing
it doesn't work. :confused:

Have you read the man page(man xmms2). It is rather detailed and has a full chapter on PATTERN.

> PATTERN
> Patterns are used to search for songs in the media library, some of
> these patterns may require escaping (with '\') depending on what shell
> is used. The properties can be found in the output of xmms2 info.

As for adding:

xmms2 add /path/to/my/music_dir /path/to/my/music_file.ogg

Never had a problem there.

Exactly. As for 'add' can I use wildcards or does a file path is relative or always has to be absolute? I mean a path relative to the directory where xmms2 was called. Sorry for such delays in answers but at the moment I don't have direct internet access.

It should generally work for relative paths as well. I believe it first checks if it is a dir/file and only then uses it as a pattern. But you can force it to file(it's in the man page). And yes you can do something/*.ogg or somewherele/*.flac etc.