Contents

4. How to install ALSA sound drivers

4.1 What you need

The great thing is: you don't need a supported sound card anymore, as ALSA now has a dummy driver that does nothing! (No, it really does nothing, but some programs will work now that they believe there is a sound card available).

If you have a PnP card, you will also need:

The INSTALL text in the driver directory suggests that for some cards, PnP support is native. I also received a suggestion from Jaroslav about this. nd-1.html" REL="prev">Previous Contents

2. NOWTO - a quick install guide

If you want sound and you want it NOW! and not after reading this HOWTO, this quick tour through the ALSA driver installation might be of help. Please note: there are a couple of differences between the ALSA versions that support 2.0 kernels and those that support 2.2 kernels.

2.1 Installing ALSA for kernels 2.2.x

You will probably want to use the ALSA 0.4.1e (or later) version if your kernel is 2.2.x. If your kernel is older, please use 0.3.0-pre4 and see below.

Just the all time ``./configure - make - make install'' stuff. Do this for drivers, library and utilities. You need all three because the utilities help you to unmute your card. Kernels 2.2.x need to have general sound support in the kernel (without choosing a specific card).

The ALSA drivers have their own devices, you can make them usinge the ./snddevices script.

You need to load the module for your card (or use kmod) and if you want sound to be backwards compatible with the Linux kernel sound drivers (yes you want this) you need two other modules called snd-pcm1-oss and snd-mixer-oss. See the section Which module for which card to find out which module to load. After loading, you can look in /proc/asound for various information about the ALSA drivers.

2.2 Playing and recording sound

A few remarks. ALSA has it's own devices in /dev/snd, for example /dev/snd/pcmC0D1 is Card 0, Device 1. You can use the old /dev/pcmXY devices if you loaded snd-pcm1-oss for backwards compatibility. You'll also want to use /dev/mixer, so load snd-mixer-oss as well. Before you can play any sound, you need to unmute the card with ``amixer''. Type ``amixer groups'', then try something like

amixer set PCM 100 unmute

Generally you can use options ``mute'' or ``unmute'', ``capture'' or ``nocapture'' and numbers.

That's it! Now if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, you may need to actually read this HOWTO...

2.3 Installing ALSA for 2.0.x

The ALSA drivers versions 0.3.0, 0.3.1 and 0.3.2 have various problems due to the restructuring of the mixer interface. Later versions do not support kernel 2.0.x, so you definately will want to use version 0.3.0-pre4 if you have a 2.0 version kernel.

Just the all time ``./configure - make - make install'' stuff. Do this for drivers, library and utilities. You need all three because the utilities help you to unmute your card. Kernels 2.0.x need to have all sound support disabled in the kernel setup

The ALSA drivers have their own devices, you can make them usinge the ./snddevices script.

You need to load the module for your card (or use kmod) and if you want sound to be backwards compatible with the Linux kernel sound drivers (yes you want this) you need another modules called snd-pcm1-oss. See the section Which module for which card to find out which module to load. After loading, you can look in /proc/asound for various information about the ALSA drivers.

2.4 Playing and recording sound

A few remarks. ALSA has it's own devices in /dev/snd, for example /dev/snd/pcmC0D1 is Card 0, Device 1. You can use the old /dev/pcmXY devices if you loaded snd-pcm1-oss for backwards compatibility. Before you can play any sound, you need to unmute the card with ``amixer''. Type ``amixer'', then try something like

amixer pcm 100 unmute

Generally you can use options ``mute'' or ``unmute'', ``rec'' or ``norec'', numbers or left:right.

That's it! Now if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, you may need to actually read this HOWTO...


Contents usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-html/mini/Alsa-sound-3.html100644 0 0 21045 7065640431 20100 0ustar rootroot Alsa-sound-mini-HOWTO: Before you start Contents

3. Before you start

3.1 Introduction

This document tries to help you install and use the ALSA sound drivers in your Linux system. The reference system is a Slackware 4.0 distribution of Linux on an AMD/K6 computer (x86 compatible), but it should work with any other Linux distribution. I do not know if the ALSA drivers work on other platforms, according to the documentation, Alpha has been tested and proven to work. I have only x86 PC's here, so any additional information you may have would be appreciated.

It might be handy to read the Linux Sound HOWTO (see section Other HOWTO's), but that HOWTO focuses on the built-in kernel drivers.

3.2 General information about the ALSA drivers

The ALSA sound driver was originally written as a replacement for the Linux kernel sound for Gravis UltraSound (GUS) c