On Thu, 07 Sep 2000, Michael Soulier wrote: > On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Jonathan Wheelhouse wrote: > > > Some people say to install from unstable the debs for ALSA and then > > run alsaconf. A couple of questions - I could change my sources to > > point at unstable but I don't want to upgrade to woody so how do I get > > just the debs for ALSA without upgrading? > > I'm using kernel 2.2.17, and I have a SB Live! Value card. I just > grabbed the Creative Labs module source, built it, and modprobed it > in. Done. >
You could also build a new 2.2.17 and either build support into your kernel or build it as module. The sb-live is right there, in the sound section. Install kernel-source-2.2.17_blahblah_.deb, unzip/tar it to /usr/src, go into the extracted main directory and run 'make menuconfig'. You might need some extra packages to do so, make, binutils, bin86, ncurses-dev come to mind. Then you choose your hardware and for stuff like sound you just compile it straight away to one big happy kernel (option: X) by 'make dep clean install' after the configuration is done. Or you can build it as module (option M in the menuconfig) and run 'make modules' and 'make modules_install' after kernel compilation and installation is done. This is just the "linux way", its not Debian specific. If you know which hardware drivers you need, building a kernel isn't hard at all and you can get rid of many features that only eat memory because you don't use them. For example, I use a scsi hd, cdrom, cdrw and floppydrive, so why would I have IDE drivers in my kernel... thats why I ditch everything I don't need. Personally, I prefer to have a monolithic kernel that exactly supports my box and nothing more, but opinions about this differ. Now I'm not saying you should compile all your software (I sure don't), but brewing a custom kernel is something every linux user can and should learn IMHO. Besides, its fun. BTW: It's likely you don't need to enter IRQ or IO values for your soundcard; if you do, building as a module is preferred, so you can tweak it with modprobe. Also I *think* the ALSA system is only for modules, not for built-in sound support but I'm not very knowledgable about alsa. I would not recommend using the woody alsa debs on a potato system. Dan
