Hello all, I hope I'm not rehashing a well known issue but I thought I'd share my alsa story. Once upon of time I kept up with new releases and was quite apt at compiling, installing, and going thru the usual configuration of the modules. This was all very pleasant and I learnt a great deal about linux drivers in general.
This all changed, however, when I upgraded to a recent distro (Mandrake 8.1) which I believed to be ALSA ready. I just couldnt get things to work and ended up reverting to the OSS drivers out of frustration. I recently learned that the problem was devfs. Despite the ALSA entries in devfsd.conf and the ALSA startup scripts provided it never worked. I have no patience for devfs and think it to be abstract overkill on a single-user machine. I'm sure its useful for keeping down the number of tty's on a multi-user machine but... So I found how to shut it off: add devfs=nomount into the boot params and everything is working like it should. I guess I'm writing to ask why Mandrakes configuration files are so flawed, whether people know this, and if anyone is doing anything about it. There needs to better documentation about how to use devfs with alsa...the HOWTO references didn't help at all. I think having ALSA run out of the box will help speed the transition from the OSS drivers. One final issue: When I run an OSS mixer like gmix I no longer get the nice tab labels for individual cards. Instead of seing the name of the card I get a generic "Mixer00" and "Mixer10". Is there any identifying string that needs to be set in the OSS setup to fix this. Well I hope the above is helpful. Thanks. A. _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
