[plug] Alsa, esd, quake and xmms

[Tim White]

Being the cautious type and one who /needs/ sound for a running system I 
compiled ALSA and OSS as modules when I upgraded to a 2.6.6 kernel. This 
meant that as soon as I booted I had OSS working and could take the time 
to try and get ALSA working. After much trouble an update to ALSA-utils 
and libasound(2?) I have managed to get ALSA working (the problem was 
alsaconf wasn't loading the module for the sound card but it loaded 
everything else.)
I can now run XMMS off esd, oss(emulation), and ALSA. I can also run 
quake3a when esd is not running and XMMS isn't attempting to use the 
soundcard through oss or ALSA (e.g. when the the song changes quake 
finishes loading.)
I think that both esd and quake3 use the oss emulation. I like esd and 
it means I can use XMMS, gaim, gnome... all at once. Unfortunately I 
can't then run quake or anything else that uses oss and not esd. I would 
like to use purely ALSA and not esd or oss-emulation if at all possible 
but don't think that there is a patch for quake yet for ALSA.

If anyone knows of a way to get both XMMS and quake to work at the same 
time then please tell me.

I was thinking that ALSA would be better than oss but if it can't allow 
simultaneous use of the sound card then its no use to me. I think then 
that is time that ALL applications accessed the sound card through a 
generic interface that allows simultaneous use of the sound card (like 
esd but on the driver/kernel side.)

Thanks
Tim