[SOLVED] OSS sound setup problems in debian

rng · 12-02-2012, 11:44 AM

I have tried to follow debian wiki and sound FAQ (http://wiki.debian.org/SoundFAQ) to install OSS. I installed oss4-base, oss4-gtk, oss4-dkms and oss-compat. The volume on speaker and from application (vlc) are full. I, the user, is part of the 'audio' group. Output of different commands are:

amixer, aumix, aplay, alsamixer, ossdetect, soundoff and soundon: command not found.

Quote:

$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)

Quote:

$ osstest
/dev/mixer: No such file or directory

Quote:

$ grep sound-slot /etc/modprobe.conf
grep: /etc/modprobe.conf: No such file or directory

Quote:

$ cat /etc/modprobe.conf
cat: /etc/modprobe.conf: No such file or directory

Quote:

$ sudo ossmix -a
/dev/mixer: No such file or directory

Quote:

$ ossinfo
No /dev/mixer device available in your system.
Perhaps Open Sound System is not installed or running.

Quote:

$ ossplay up.wav
/dev/dsp: No such file or directory

The sound device file is missing from /dev.
You should try re-installing OSS.

Problem persists even after reinstalling oss4 packages. There is no sound.

Please help me sort out this problem. Thanks.

Peacedog · 12-02-2012, 03:44 PM

Hi rng, is there reason you chose to try building oss instead of working with alsa? Did you follow this oss4 tutorial?

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=52919

Which version of Debian are you working from?

Good luck. ;-)

rng · 12-02-2012, 08:00 PM

I am on debian testing. The how-to page is very good. But still the sound is not working. Even soundon and soundoff commands are not working. Which package provides these commands? I could not find even with apt-file package.

rng · 12-03-2012, 12:54 AM

I am getting following message at boot time:

Quote:

Mon Dec 3 11:49:24 2012: [....] Starting Open Sound System: FAIL- failed (No kernel modules detected).

I did modprobe by commands:
sudo modprobe snd-pcm-oss
sudo modprobe snd_hda_intel

The osstest and ossinfo commands now working but giving errors:

Quote:

$ ossinfo
Version info: (0x00000000)
Platform: Linux/i686 3.2.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.2.32-1 (debian)

Number of audio devices: 0
Number of audio engines: 0
Number of MIDI devices: 0
Number of mixer devices: 0

Device objects

MIDI devices (/dev/midi*)

Mixer devices

Audio devices

Nodes
/dev/sndstat -> /proc/asound/oss/sndstat

The kernel error at boot time is still there.
How can I over this problem? Thanks for your help.

jim_p · 12-03-2012, 01:36 AM

Obviously, something has changed since the above guide was written. Install oss4-dkms and let it do it's job with dkms.

Else, if you want to do it the "old school" way with module assistant, and do it on every kernel upgrade manually, do

Code:

m-a prepare
m-a update
m-a a-i oss4

Also, make sure that all relevant packages for the job, like make, the kernel headers etc are installed.

rng · 12-03-2012, 01:52 AM

Yes it worked! I reinstalled oss4-dkms and rebooted. Then there was sound.
At some stage I had commented out the only line from /etc/modprobe.d/alsa_blacklist.conf :

Quote:

#install soundcore /bin/false

I am not sure if that was creating problem earlier.

Or maybe because I had not installed oss4-sources earlier (I thought they were only if you want to build modules yourself). I do not know.

Many thanks for your help.

Am I likely to encounter problems with some applications with OSS as I read that some application support only ALSA?