[Mageia-dev] OSS sound support

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and David Walser at 26/02/12 12:48 did gyre and gimble:
> Kamil Rytarowski wrote:
>> On 06.02.2012 11:11, EatDirt wrote:
>>> On 10/10/11 11:20, Guillaume Rousse wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Just for curiosity, where is OSS support needed nowadays ?
>>>> Quake and co ?
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> At least for wmix and wmsmixer too :)
>>> 
>>> chris.
>>> 
>> I have found a walkaroud for this - use psdsp from
>> pulseaudio-utils.
> 
> If a program needs OSS sound, if it's a graphical program, its menu
> entry should use "soundwrapper" before the command.  It will use
> padsp if pulseaudio is active or aoss if it's not.

Just for completeness (I know you know this David :))

Well this is the whole point in osspd.

When osspd, none of the previous hacks (i.e. padsp, aoss and, therefore,
soundwrapper generally) are needed any longer.

osspd uses relatively recent capabilities of the kernel - CUSE - to
create userspace character devices i.e. /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer.

These are then proxied to a userspace program (osspd) which in this case
passes it on to PulseAudio.

This is a more complete solution and should work in cases where
soundwrapper-based solutions failed (i.e. some games just didn't like
it, and then there are also sometimes issues when running 32-bit apps on
64-bit systems).

Soundwrapper has already been patched by David to be a noop if osspd is
running.

Now there is really no valid reason to use an OSS mixer application
these days, but apps themselves still have their place.

Cheers

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
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