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Debian

Installing/Configuring ALSA Sound Modules In Debian 221

Posted by Hemos from the how-to-make-the-sounds dept.
GonzoJohn writes "Linux Orbit explains how: "A very common question that comes up when trying Debian GNU/Linux is how the heck do you get Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (a.k.a. ALSA) sound modules set up properly? In this HOWTO we'll show you how to compile and install the ALSA kernel modules, and then setup things using the ALSA Debian script so that modules are automatically loaded and unloaded, and your mixer levels are saved and restored on boot up. Here are some things you'll need to have before you start this HOWTO""
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Installing/Configuring ALSA Sound Modules In Debian More

Installing/Configuring ALSA Sound Modules In Debian

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  • Wow... (Score:5, Informative)

    by delta407 ( 518868 ) <slashdot@@@lerfjhax...com> on Friday November 01, 2002 @08:50PM (#4582129) Homepage
    Gentoo Linux [gentoo.org] has had a similar guide for months, without coverage on the front page of Slashdot. (And, if I may say so, the Gentoo way is cleaner.)

    Maybe I'm missing something, but why/how is this news?

    • Mandrake doesn't need a guide (Score:5, Informative)

      by dan the person ( 93490 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @09:27PM (#4582254) Homepage Journal
      It has ALSA built in.

      Compiling your own kernel additions is for experimental stuff, not stuff that has been working for years like ALSA

    • Re:Wow... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Wow, another gentoo post on a Debian story. Now that's something you don't see everyday.

    • Re:Wow... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by munter ( 619803 )
      Maybe I'm missing something, but why/how is this news?

      Hmm.

      Fair call.

      Why is it that Debian gets good coverage? Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that it's at the source of the revolution. Transform the way IT services are done. Create a free system. Oh! you mean I pay for support services. Uh, OK, cool.

      Suddenly people with lotsa debian needing debian aware dudez. We don't need Microsoft arse-brains anymore. Closed Source is dead.

      Hmm. Industry transformed. Excellent!

      • I was inclined to moderate you as a troll. However, curiosity beat me:

        Apart from birth times, how the heck is Debian at the center of the "revolution" and Gentoo isn't, or why do you think Debian is free and Gentoo isn't?

        If you are not going to give an informed answer, and will just repeat distribution zealotry, please refrain from answering.

        • because debian has more, what you should call it, credibility you might say, it's been around longer, has more zealots, and all in all kicks ass. also, gentoo looks like it's trying to hit in to the mainstream vein, as in trying to be the desktop of choice for newbies and guru's alike.

          but, still, what's the biggest thing, go look at www.debian.org and www.gentoo.org. gentoo.org is pushing companies actively(nvidia & ibm logos on front page, ok, news items, but still).. and has stuff like screenshots. AND 'buy mem from crucial.com blabla'

          would you install gentoo on your mp3 playing machine(your old p200mmx) that you would like to keep up-to-date still but has 32mb of mem or so, and still have xfree and some bells'n'whistles? debian works great for that too.(others work well for this too)

          one of my friends was just a while ago converted to debian FROM gentoo, figure it out...

          these are of course just impressions and take with grain of apt-get and i personally like dselect so i guess i'm a freak. and i really don't dig that some gentoo people running around telling they're system is x percent more effective or that the windows load up faster but you can't measure it..

          • gentoo looks like it's trying to hit in to the mainstream vein, as in trying to be the desktop of choice for newbies and guru's alike.

            I think you completly missed it on this one. Gentoo is not for newbies, nor do they try to sell themselves as such. To quote them directly [gentoo.org];

            Gentoo Linux is a versatile and fast, completely free Linux distribution for x86, PowerPC, UltraSparc and Alpha systems that's geared towards Linux power users.

          • Trying to itemize your reasoning:

            1) Whoever gets to the market first, and has more zealots is best (where best=more credibility, more freedom, more quality)

            2) Linux should never approach companies, and capitalist markets, under the risk of losing freedom.

            3) Linux distribution quality is measured largely by the ability to run in older hardware. Conversely, ability to adapt to new hardware features is irrelevant because no one measured it.

            Answering point by point:

            1) You should be running a *BSD. It has been around since the late 70s. Its zealots are by far the most fanatic among the OSS crowd. Security and stability are unbeatable by Linux. Its harder to run. Harder than Debian, now that I come to think of it that way.

            2) Some companies are likely to see linux as a strategic advantage. In fact, IBM, the main supporter behind Gentoo, is one of them. It'd be stupid to forfeit this help. See this article [joelonsoftware.com] for some insight on IBM's (and others') motivations on OSS.

            3) I totally refuse this "old hardware" vision. And it's not that you can't install older software on a Gentoo distribution. Just emerge older ebuilds. The fact that you *can* emerge recent software doesn't mean you *have to*. And to think you have to measure the gain in performance from i386 asm to P4 asm is unclassifiable.

            • 1) the *bsd zealots say it's esier than debian, and debian zealots say debian is easier than redhat/others... because of the simplicity of keeping it up to date and working well.

              *** 3) I totally refuse this "old hardware" vision. And it's not that you can't install older software on a Gentoo distribution. Just emerge older ebuilds. The fact that you *can* emerge recent software doesn't mean you *have to*. And to think you have to measure the gain in performance from i386 asm to P4 asm is unclassifiable. ***

              i _want_ to have _recent_ software(xfree4.2, kde3, whatever), but i don't want to _compile_ something that will take _days_ to finish on that older hardware, the point is that gentoo isn't meant to be able to install in practical timeframe to low end pc's.

  • It's about time they wrote a HOWTO for this (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SexyKellyOsbourne ( 606860 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @08:52PM (#4582136) Journal
    One of the biggest turn offs for new users to Linux is the general lack of sound support which either

    1) Requires recompiling the kernel and crossing your fingers.

    2) Requires you to use the beasts known as ALSA and crossing your fingers.

    Operating systems are no longer stale command prompts with beeps and blurps -- they are full mutlimedia systems, and having working sound support in the first install should be a priority for Linux distributions.

    When Linux newbies have a lack of HOWTOs and sound support is diffuclt to implement, at best they are going to fool around with Linux for a day or two and then go back to their MP3 collection under Windows.
    • *raises hand* I am one of those newbies who gave up on debian. Mp3s wasn't a major reason, but it was one... More people will use Linux if it is easy to use. Posting a HOWTO every once in a while is helpful, and I'm sure things like this will help linux grow even more.
    • This is an article installing ALSA in Debian. ALSA is part of the kernel now and in the future hopefully articles like this won't be needed.

      FWIW, I have installed Woody and RH8 on a lot of systems, including my laptop, where the sound worked out of the box with no config necessary. It's alot more newbie friendly in RH8, where most of the time sound worked when I loaded up GNOME without any sound config at all.

      Usually on Woody all you need is to add the user to the sound group.
      • well...my laptop does not seem to want to work with audio...I have a VIA ac97 sound chip and it does not want to work with OSS modules that come in the kernel.
        • My laptop has a ac97 chip in it too, what option did you pick in the kernel? My laptop (Dell 8200) is using the intel ICH (i8xx) driver)

          SealBeater
        • well, since ac97 is probably one of the most basic sound drivers for linux and has been around for a long time you should try looking around a bit and figuring out what you actually have in your system (i have a via8233 that reports itself as an ac97 compatible chip but doesn't like the kernel drivers, it requires the alsa via82xx drivers to work properly). of course, this is kind of defeats the thread's point that sound configuration should be easy and automatic... hopefully now that alsa, et al. are making it into the kernel outright we should be seeing this in the future.
        • well...my laptop does not seem to want to work with audio...I have a VIA ac97 sound chip and it does not want to work with OSS modules that come in the kernel.

          My laptop has one of those too. You need ALSA.

          And yes, I did recompile the kernel and ALSA modules some months ago. It's not that terrible, but you do need a lot of disk (300 MB or so)... However, you do not have to compile the kernel, nor the ALSA modules, if you're using Woody and a 2.4 kernel. The package is already done, it's just that for some reason it is still in unstable. Probably some issue that hasn't been dealt with yet, I don't know. The packages work for me. Just fetch the right package for your kernel [debian.org], run dpkg -i on it, and configure for your card.

          Actually, you can configure apt to do this kind of thing without having to download stuff manually, but it's probably not worth it if the only thing you want from unstable is ALSA (or see apt_preferences(5) for details, if you do want to know more).

    • Re:It's about time they wrote a HOWTO for this (Score:4, Insightful)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @09:10PM (#4582201)
      Um, go use a distro like Mandrake that auto-detects sound cards. It was one thing to bitch about this back when no Linux distro autodetected hardware. It's another thing to bitch about advanced distros (Debian) and development code (ALSA).
    • NOW look at all those Windows people giggling and pointing their fingers at us!

      (Remember the airplane joke, what the linux people did...)

    • When Linux newbies have a lack of HOWTOs and sound support is diffuclt to implement, at best they are going to fool around with Linux for a day or two and then go back to their MP3 collection under Windows.

      I know this first hand. I attempted to set up debian a number of months ago, and setting up my SB AWE 64 was the biggest pain I had. I managed to get an ftp server up and running, using my linux box as a router and sharing internet access between my roommates and I, even setting up a firewall. (I've never run any kind of unix or unix-like system before). GNOME and KDE weren't much of a hassle, and I managed to even get my Voodoo 2 card working so I could run low framerate UT.

      The two things I could NOT get to work (and the two things that kept me from using debian fulltime) was getting a video player to work (for all the porn on my FTP server) and my sound! (for both the porn and MP3's on my FTP server, and games)

      Had I gotten those to work, I would be writing this in debian now. Sound is very important when you're trying to gib your friends in Quake3. I've heard that gentoo makes it really simple, but alas, I am now restricted to a POTS 16.9 Kbps for my internet connection (No cable/DSL where I live...) and I don't want to take the time to download the distribution again...

    • Don't confuse Linux with debian.

      Newbies should get SuSE or Mandrake, pop in the DVD, wait for half an hour and have a full functional desktop - including office suite and loads of useful stuff preinstalled. (Try to unpack a .rar in a clean Windows install. Or try ICQ. Or IRC.)

      Linux can be much easier than Windows if you choose the right distribution.

      I'm so sick of FUD like this:

      having working sound support in the first install should be a priority for Linux distributions

      All major commercial distributions (hell, even RedHat which is by far the worst of all) had sound-support out of the box for years.

      Yet the Wintrolls just don't get it.

      (P.S. Yes, debian has it's uses, too. apt-get is great, the stability is excellent. Yet it's not really for users not willing to invest some time installing.)

    • When Linux newbies have a lack of HOWTOs and sound support is diffuclt to implement, at best they are going to fool around with Linux for a day or two and then go back to their MP3 collection under Windows.

      Debian doesnt need mllions of users; it exists to service a small number of people who want to learn about Linux.

      If they did want millions of people to use it, its developers would (for example) make superior installers, so that it can be simply used.

      Each distro has its audience. Its highly unlikely that someone switching from Windows will encounter Debian as their first distro in any case.

  • Why is this newsworthy? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by oingoboingo ( 179159 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @08:54PM (#4582143)
    Sound card detection and setup happens invisibly and automatically on several other distributions. Why is this article worth mentioning? What would actually be newsworthy would be some Debian people swallowing their pride and incorporating some of the excellent automatic hardware detection, setup and installation routines that the other distro developers have produced. That's what free and open software is all about, right?

    • Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PigeonGB ( 515576 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @08:59PM (#4582168) Homepage
      It isn't about pride, as much as the number of Debian users would make it sound.
      It is more of the fact that Debian can't release a new Stable version until it works on all of the supported platforms.

      But you are right. There should be no reason why something like autodetection shouldn't be incorporated into the install process. That is why they are working on a new install/boot process. An active mailing list to be on, let me tell you.
    • but what about us debian users who might be less knowledgable to write a whole automatic hardware detection and just want to use the distro for what it's worth? I don't mind doing things manually if there are instructions on how to do it.

      I use debian fairly often but wanted to use ALSA since I found out it was able to restore sound when my laptop resumed from suspend mode. The ALSA installation just seemed to complex and I just didn't have time from my job to sit there and read the docs on the ALSA site. It's really great there are informative howtos that tell you step by step what you need and how to accomplish it. You won't believe how many howtos I've read on that old UNC site! (I think it's linuxdoc.org now?)
  • The article tends to mention alot of other HOW-TO's in its introduction and recommend you read them first, then it does into expousing the benefits of using the 2.5.x kernel config.

    In other worlds, intereting read.

    It does provide information about Sarge and all...

    Also,*Note: Britney Spears is not part of the KDREV option, so if you do leave out KDREV it will look like...

    That's interesting.

  • NOW they have a HOWTO.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PigeonGB ( 515576 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @08:57PM (#4582156) Homepage
    I spent a week getting sound to work on my system by using Google and experimenting. Then they decide to make it easy so that my accomplishment would mean nothing to all of the newbies who show up.
    I can hear/see it now:
    "Hey guys, do YOU have sound on your system? I do!", I exclaim, with beaming pride.

    "Uh, yeah whatever dude," they would say. "I got sound working too. Dumbass."

    I can no longer consider myself 1337. B-(

  • Nice Article. Audio in general (Score:5, Interesting)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @08:57PM (#4582159) Journal
    I've just installed Mandrake, and I need to decide which of the El-Cheapo Pretends-To-Be-Soundblaster-Compatible audio cards I've got I should install, so the timing is really convenient for me. The ALSA [alsa-project.org] folks rock, compared to the quality of driver support for soundcards on Linux in the past.

    I'm also evaluating getting a better audio card, but I've had trouble finding decent documentation, even on the boxes - sure, everything does eight-dimensional 12-in-1 audio output, but what's I'm more interested in is the quality of the A/D converter, so when I input sound from analog media (my old vinyl disks and analog tapes) it doesn't lose more than necessary. Are there chipsets to avoid, or to hunt around for?

    • Re:Nice Article. Audio in general (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Absolutely. You want to be looking at soundcards like the M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 (what I use), or Terraenc's cards. Others like ones from Digital Audio Labs (DAL), or Echo. None of these names are common, but the chipset in common is the Envy24 chipset: easily one of the best out there in terms of S/N ratio, etc.

      I would recommend checking out www.pcavtech.com for actual *real* measurements -- you can see how much of the SoundBlasters are merely marketing hype, and how much is real performance.

      As for ALSA support: Midiman/M-Audio's soundcards are all well-supported. I haven't any clue about the others: theoretically, if the chipset is the same or very similar, there should be no complaints, but I wouldn't count on anything...
    • If you've got the right analog equipment, an SB Live! Platinum is actually rather good for what you're after.

      The Live! is very well supported in Linux as far as my experience goes, and its analog inputs are pretty good. I don't have any hard figures, but going from my old vinyl to 192kbit MP3 (through LAME) compares *very* favorably to going from CD to same quality MP3 (Perl Jam - Vitalogy on vinyl and CD)

      Also, the original Live! Platinum is available for around US$50 if you shop around.

      (of course, all this is useless if you're looking for archive quality recording, but moving from your 'El-Cheapo Pretends-To-Be-Soundblaster-Compatible' it'd be an order of magnitde better)

    • Re:Nice Article. Audio in general (Score:5, Informative)

      by adolf ( 21054 ) <flodadolf@gmail.com> on Saturday November 02, 2002 @03:19AM (#4583033) Journal
      If you're really quite serious about A/D quality, look into using an external box for the task. Midiman makes a couple of different, well-performing 24-bit models, and they occasionally pop up on Ebay. Or, you could pick up a nice pawnshop/Ebay DAT or Minidisc deck, and use that.

      Not that you need 24 bits to transcribe vinyl, but it does help ensure that you'll not run out of headroom. Later in the process, you can normalize the audio and truncate or dither it down to 16, while preserving every nuance of the album's pops, ticks, and surface hiss.

      Plug a box like this into a sound card's SP/DIF input. The stupider, cheaper, more DSP-phobic cards will generally be more likely to do a bit-perfect job of this, such as the $12 Zoltrix Nighingale or other CMI8738-based cards. Along the same lines, do try to avoid anything branded Creative Labs, mmkay? They've got bad habits like irrevocable resampling, and are noisy throughout (even when only doing strictly "digital" things with SP/DIF IO).

      That said:

      I used to play engineer for a streamed talk radio show. Equipment was limited to the gear in a small project recording studio, none of which was intended for broadcast use, aside from the scrap-built Linux box running liveice and lame.

      Since this box needed a sound card, I drove over to the nearest white-box OEM parts dealer and started looking. I picked a YMF744-based (XG) PCI card from AOpen, similar to this one [aopen.com], based primarily on the component count: It was the only card under $50 which was not branded Creative, and appeared to have reasonable analog filter stages and signal paths.

      It turns out that this card, along with other Yamaha XG cards, has superb support under ALSA, and that the quality of the converters is not bad.

      The control of the card was such that I was able to calibrate it to the output meters on the Tascam console, and monitor the program via digital loopback through its own DAC at 0 gain.

      I could then push a button on the console, and switch between monitoring the signal in its original analog state, or after it'd been through a ADC->DAC stage without worrying that varying levels would skew my perception.

      In the (somewhat noisy) enviroment I was in, I could hear no difference in overall quality with or without the Aopen card in-line. This cheap sound card was, in a word, transparent, at least for my purposes. Which is all I can ask of any sound card.

      ALSA made this easy, but I suspect I'd have trouble doing things so precisely under other operating systems.

      But I've noticed that not all XG-based cards are made the same. Hoontech sells, or at least sold a year or two ago, some expensive studio-oriented monstrosities which doubtless sound beautiful. On the other end of things, I've heard some laptops with XG chips which sounded horrible.

      Lately, I've been recording my 2-year-old daughter's various noises with an SB Live 5.1. The results are OK, but nothing like what I remember hearing in the studio. I could blame the card's on-board mic preamp or the sound of my apartment, but I fear that shoddy AD plays at least as large a role in the matter.

      Good luck.

  • So, let me get this straight. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by markv242 ( 622209 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @09:22PM (#4582240)
    In order to add great sound support to Debian, you have to:

    - Make sure you have a 2.5.x kernel or above.
    - Select your card from a dropdown.
    - Retrieve, unpack, and compile source code.
    - Install resulting software with a strange command-line utility.
    - Retrieve, unpack, and install even more software.
    - Edit a configuration file.
    - Edit another configuration file.
    - Run a script.
    - Start a daemon.

    Wow. That's so easy! I can see why OS X is the number one selling Unix:

    - Go to System Preferences.
    - Select "Sound".
    - Select "Output".
    - Select your high-end audio card.
    - Select "Input".
    - Select your high-end audio card.

    Let's assume that your time is worth $50/hr. After a few hours of struggling to set up sound under Linux, that extra cash for Apple hardware doesn't sound so bad...

    • no, you can have a 2.4 kernel, you will just have to compile an alsa module or apt-get one
    • "Let's assume that your time is worth $50/hr."

      How about we assume that your being paid $50/hr to setup sound for a client. I don't know about you, but after those few hours of *ahem* struggling, I just made $150 bucks.

    • Re:So, let me get this straight. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by m0rph3us0 ( 549631 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @09:47PM (#4582315)
      I don't see why this is flamebait, personally I would mod it up had i any points, the author has a great point, even *after* you have ALSA working you still have to mess around with at least GNOME and KDE's sound servers to get them to cooperate thru ALSA instead of using OSS and recieving an exclusive lock on the sound card. It's really anoying that it takes so long to get things working on debian, however the alternative is something like mandrake that is easy to install but takes years to get anything not on the CD's working. then there is Mac OS X, it works, its stable, but if you want to run non-OS X apps you're back in the same boat of spending lots of time changing code to work.

      I can't count the number of tarballs i've compiled that were designed for Linux / FreeBSD and compiled clean under OpenBSD, really there is no OS that is generally easy to use for an advanced user.
      My main beefs are:

      OS X: Almost nothing will compile.

      OpenBSD: Everything needs to be installed from source.

      Windows: Security, stability, proprietary protocols.

      Linux: Unless you are using debian most things of things need to be compiled from source. If you are using debian its a nightmare to configure.

      It all generally boils down to spending alot of time to get basic things working. Once you attain advanced user status its basically a matter of spending lots of time getting everything working no matter what OS you use.

      Computing sucks.
      • I think some people will always mod down anything that seems to be anti-Linux... I use Linux as nothing more than an operating system. I think those that evangelize it should continue doing so, but heck, it's still an operating system package guys. People use it for what it's worth.

      • You should try Red Hat apparently, since almost nothing will need to be compiled from source, and it's all easy to configure.
      • Just a tip if you want to get stuff compiled in OSX.

        Fink.

        http://fink.sf.net/

        It's an OSX packaging project based on the debian packaging system but with some other goodies thrown into it. In fact, from what I read about Gentoo, it has some similarites to it. As of last count, it has over 1400 packages in the system with more being added every day. Perhaps the BEST part of this is that it makes it trivial for upstream maintainers to get their software compiling clean out of the box on OSX. Since 10.1, most common packages compile clean 'out of the box'. Others will work fine with the addition of a few command line options to turn off precompiled headers and two-level linking namespaces.

        If you go to the fink project home page, look in the documentation under 'porting', it will give you a few tips. For the most part, OSX is a very 'vanilla' UNIX flavor with few surprises. Really the only thing of note is how it handles shared/dynamic libraries, and there is even a library that will 'fake' the library loading behavior of other linux platforms.
      • I don't understand the whole damn discussion! Installing alsa, from damn source code, in the dark 0.5 days, was the following for me:

        tar -xjf alsa-driver-whatever.bz2 ./configure; make install
        tar -xjf alsa-utils-whatever.bz2 ./configure;make install
        modprobe snd-ymfpci

        DONE. Everything worked magically just like it did before. Nothing locked my /dev/dsp. I don't understand why everybody is complaining that ALSA was "impossible to install" etc. It's complete BS, if you ask me.
    • And with your OS X sounds support, you can play a lot of great games. Like Warcraft III ... and .... umm ..... photoshop!

      As bitchy as linux is to setup, the fact that there are better games out for it (since WINE works pretty well now) means that I get to use my sound for something besides iTunes.

    • Wow. That's so easy! I can see why OS X is the number one selling Unix

      <sarcasm>
      Of course: if something doesn't work out of the box in OS X, you have nothing to do but wait for the next release (and buy it)...
      </sarcasm>

      And of course, everything has to work out of the box on MacOS X, since it would pretty lame for a company that gets to decide what hardware has to be put inside its machines.

      And of course, everything works out of the box on a Linux distribution if you stick to the supported hardware, which is what you should do in the first place like when you bought an Apple with OS X.

      The point on MacOS X is that you can't choose non-Apple-sanctioned hardware and expect the clicky-pointy things to work.

      Do you remember the times of the non-Apple clones? (i.e. Umax ones). Remember how MacOS wasn't guaranteed to run very well on these?

  • Last I checked, ALSA was rough to install (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Booker ( 6173 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @09:35PM (#4582281) Homepage
    I'm sure alsa does lots of cool things, but I never got past the fact that with the oss drivers, I could:

    $ modprobe es1370

    and away I went.

    With ALSA, I could load 15 or twenty drivers, and even if I managed to pick all the right ones, the damn things were muted by default! :) WTFIUWT?

    So.. maybe a howto is a good thing. But why is it so damn complex that it requires a howto?

  • Please keep this in mind.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ACK!! ( 10229 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @09:41PM (#4582296) Journal
    If your distro picks up, configures and sets your sound up without ALSA then you do NOT have to do this. You can and ogle for playing DVDs requires it but personally on my maestro3 card the sound from the OSS driver is better IMO compared to ALSA.

    In ALSA it sounds sort of tinny and strained, it seems like the plain-jane maestro3 as opposed to the ALSA snd-maestro3 works better at least on my laptop.

    I never seem to have trouble with my sound till I start mucking with it by hand. If I accept the distro defaults I am usually better off. This is a good thing for distros by the way. However, this is the exact opposite in terms of XF86Config. It seems like I always find two or three things to tweak manually that the distro-makers miss.

    Oh well...

    ________________________________________________ __

  • RTFM (Score:4, Funny)

    by m0i ( 192134 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @09:48PM (#4582316) Homepage
    I can't see how this is newsworthy, it's already in your /usr/share/doc/alsa-source/README.Debian.gz. And they use the far simpler make-kpkg instead of building manually with lengthy vars to define that nobody remembers.
    Ok, the big news was indeed: use apt-get install alsa-source and read the manual to get alsa to work on Debian ;-)

  • "getting sound working" is not the whole story. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fishbowl ( 7759 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @10:00PM (#4582343)
    Since most people only want sound hardware for output, this is probably enough.

    If you are looking to migrate away from Cakewalk, Cubase, or Logic to a Linux solution, it's still a pipe dream. Sure there are a million audio projects, but the cubase killer is just not out there, not in the pipeline, and I don't even imagine it's in the cards.

    A linux version of Fruityloops would be awesome, and if it were able to host VST applications, it would be of significant value to me.

    One other point; I'd like to see a howto that deals specifically with the 2.5 kernel and debian.

    The article is clear and concise, and it stops short of telling you how to, say, do multitrack recording, enabling 24/96 recording and mixing, or how to enable hardware synths. It also doesn't give any card specific help (Ice1712 M-Audio cards, anyone?) This is really just a special case of "installing modules" which is documented pretty well, elsewhere.

  • I'm a loyal Debian user. My Soundblaster Live! works just fine for me with the regular modules I'm using. Can someone explain to me what the advantages of ALSA are?

    Yeah yeah, I know... RTFM. But I'm sure others on here are wondering what ALSA brings to the fold. Easy +5 informative here guys.

    • The biggest advantage is that the drivers are maintained. The OSS drivers in the kernel are ancient. I've got an old ISA sound card that is absolutely perfect for making the all beeps that a computer needs to make. All I need is a minimal driver that will compile on a 2.4.x SMP server. Might as well use one of those stupid ISA slots for something. It even works in KDE.
    • Depends on the card I think. But in general the ALSA drivers support more features then the OSS-free drivers found in the 2.4 and prior kernels. The big differences I found were:

      full duplex support (record and play at the same time.)

      multiple voices, so multiple programs can play audio at the same time.

  • "Perfect" multimedia support is all we need... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by manly_15 ( 447559 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @10:26PM (#4582397)
    ...to have an OS that will convert the intermediate computer users to linux.

    Linux has become absolutely great for two of the three sets of computer users. Newbies will have no more problems installing Mandrake than when installing Windows. Redhat and Mandrake both make is simple to set up the internet, web browsing, office app, etc. Power users love the control that Linux gives them over their system. However, linux is a nightmare for the people who are right in the middle. The things (like games) are just a little too hard to set up. The things that newbies wouldn't care about are the breaking points for the intermediate people. If something isn't autodetected by the install, it's a great deal harder to set it up in Linux than Windows.

    So any distro that tries to make multimedia and gaming easier and more user friendly to set up gets my vote of approval. Even if it seems redundant.
  • Install Mandrake :-)
    • I don't know so much about mandrake, but answer me a few questions:

      Does it run on PowerPC?
      Does it run on Sparc?
      Does it run on Alpha?
      Does it run on x86?
      Is the installation/setup the same across all four hardware platforms?
      Are the packages well-maintained across all four platforms, including regular security updates?

      When you can answer yes to all 6 questions, I'll consider it. Until then, I have too many computers to maintain to have a software-homogenous network...
  • I don't get it you, want your computer to make sound? I run debian without sound. What do you need sound for, to listen all those MP3's your stealing off P2P networks? It's not like you can play any cool games on Linux, that's what my wife's computer is for.

    "Dude, I totally got sound working on my debian box. It took like 2 days and now I can listen to my Tool cd while I am reading Slashdot.", says Linux dipshit.

    "Yeah, I can listen to Tool as well.", as I place the Tool cd in my radio and push play - that was hard.

    I am joking of course. Sound on Debian is a pain in the ass it's good to see they made a HOWTO. I just hope they never implement any of that auto-detection crap other distros use, then every newbie and their grandmother is going to start downloading debian and 'apt-get update' will take forever.

    Peace, viva la Debian!

    • I work at a radio station. I love music. If I had to keep track of all my real world CDs, I wouldn't even be able to remember what was available for me to put into my stereo. Of course, I don't have a stereo, so there's that, too.

      By ripping all of my CDs to (currently, because no hardware Ogg players) MP3 format, I can, if I so desire, have a randomised playlist that will last for many days. I can organise my collection in any number of ways. My roommates NFS-mount my drive, so they can listen to it all without going into my room (and I can listen to it downstairs). I can lend a CD to a friend and not really care.

      I don't download MP3s from P2P networks because most of them suck and I don't have enough time to search around for the few that don't.

  • WTF? (Score:2, Informative)

    by damiam ( 409504 )
    What is it with all these links to "How to do x on Debian Howto"? We've had probably five over the last week or two. I love Debian, and I use it as my main OS, but shouldn't this be linked from (or included in) the Debian installation manual or user's guide? The huge majority of slashdotters that don't use Debian don't care.
  • I purchased the commercial OSS drivers about two years ago (maybe less, i don't remember) and believe that they are all around better than the alsa drivers. Don't get me wrong, the alsa drivers are great, but they don't seem to give me the same edge over fine tuning my sound as OSS. Also, i figure that for $30 bucks, those damned drivers had better be superior to ALSA (free as in speech/beer) in every respect. The installation is far superior to anything alsa has to offer. Unzip the tarball, run 'oss-install' and point-n-click your way to sound. I still feel as though I made the right decision. I have a feeling, however, that soon, i will regret purchasing them. (of course, at the time i purchased them, they were pretty much the only decent set of sound drivers available).

  • Why ALSA is sooo Important (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Proudrooster ( 580120 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @12:02AM (#4582602) Homepage
    Many of you may be wondering, why ALSA made front page news. There are several reasons:

    1. ALSA sound drivers are nearly impossible to install.
    2. If you want to turn your Linux box into a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) ala TiVo, then you need the alsa drivers and the stuff from the GATOS project.

    (See) http://gatos.sourceforge.net/overview.php

    I am glad that someone posted the HOW-TO... Alsa has been a big thorn in my side for awhile now. Maybe now I can get the ALSA-Mixer working properly.

    Good Luck, and may your all Linux boxes be PVR's!
  • http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other- formats/html_single/MIDI-HOWTO.html [ibiblio.org]

    I don't want to troll but the Debian community asked the Linux Documentation Project to move the HOWTO's over to the GNU Free Documentation License, ./ article [slashdot.org], yet from looking at the Linux Orbit article it appears that the MIDI-HOWTO cannot include any of it's work as there are no indications that this text is opensource.

    ALSA, and Linux audio development in general, is making HUGE progress.

    Yes, things are still in development, ALSA 0.9 in 2.5 kernel is not meant for wide-scale use, but there are a significant number of very happy Debian users out there and once everything goes stable Linux will be the same ass kicking platform for audio as it is for servers.

    The MIDI-HOWTO covers ALSA installation and whilst earlier version were more difficult to install, support for soundcards improves every day making it easier every release.

    Phil

  • Only works with alsa 0.9 rc 3 (Score:3, Informative)

    by Rushuru ( 135939 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @05:12AM (#4583213)
    For those interested in setting up alsa, note that the modules options file in the article is only valid for alsa 0.9 up to rc3

    The line
    options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=4 snd_device_mode=0660 snd_device_gid=29 snd_device_uid=0

    wont work with newer versions (for instance Sid has 0.9rc5, an so I guess Testing will have it soon too), because (from www.alsa-project.org)

    We have changed the kernel module symbol names (module parameter names). We removed prefix 'snd_'. Please, update your /etc/modules.conf files by hand or use our alsa-driver/utils/module-options script which does this job. Please, notice that 'snd_' prefix is not equal to 'snd-' prefix (module name) which is left unchanged.
    That means you need to change the previous line into something like:

    options snd major=116 cards_limit=4 device_mode=0660 device_gid=29 device_uid=0
    Hope this helps
  • I actually just installed ALSA last night based on Jon Aslund's excellent HOWTO [d.kth.se] from August. The LinuxOrbit one looks good too, but I thought I'd through out another url. Two HOWTO's are always better than one after all.

    Kalin

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