[Preston] Detection of Sound Cards

[Dougie Nisbet]

On Sunday 25 January 2004 10:44 pm, Matthew T. Atkinson wrote:
> 'ellow,
>
> On Sun, 2004-01-25 at 18:41, Dougie Nisbet wrote:
> > configured my SBLIVE into the kernel and it's worked fine. Is there any
> > advantage to using ALSA? I'd hate to think I was missing out on anything!
>
> To be honest, I have not used OSS enough to really know what ALSA does
> that OSS doesn't.  I became curious as to why I was actually using ALSA
>
> :-) (it is a long time since this box was set up -- and when it was I
>
> was still a newbie and had a lot of help from a friend so I don't
> remember the rationale behind some decisions), so I found the following
> bits of info:
>
> http://www.eca.cx/lad/2002/Mar/0109.html
> http://www.linuxhardware.org/features/01/03/06/179255.shtml
>

Thanks for the info. The 2nd link has an interesting bit about the SBLIVE:

<Begin Quote>
Perhaps the best reason to use ALSA is that it can provide better support for 
the advanced features of many popular soundcards. For example, the 
Soundblaster Live ALSA driver supports hardware wavetable MIDI, with 
soundfont support. Its OSS counterpart doesn't. 
<End Quote>

It seems that the trend will be towards ALSA in the longer term anyway so I 
might as well bite the bullet just now while my system's in bits and give 
ALSA a whirl. I might not be saying that tomorrow but we'll see. 
	
	apt-cache search alsa | less

shows tons of matches but I assume alsa-common is the main package I need. But 
first, get X working. Always good for a laugh.

Dougie