[plug] Sound card support in linux.

[Matt Kemner]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Mark Saxon wrote:

> Not tried the ALSA drivers but they give no indication on the ALSA site
> what level of support the drivers offer..
> >From the reading I've done so far it seems setting up a hybrid OSS -
> AlSA drivers system could be a bit tricky.

You don't need to set up a hybrid OSS/ALSA system. ALSA emulates OSS
so you recompile your kernel to disable support for your sound card (but
leave "sound support" switched on) and compile the ALSA drivers, which is
as simple as "configure;make;make install"

> Do any of the distros have ALSA support built in?

It's a kernel issue, not really a distro issue, although Debian at least
comes with the "alsa utils" as well as the "alsa modules" for the
prepackaged kernels that Debian comes with.

So you can probably get it to work easily under Debian if you never
recompile your own kernel, but I wouldn't know because I always do :)

 - Matt