[lug] OSS (Remember that?)

[Dhruva B. Reddy]

If anyone's interested, I figured it out, with the help of this:

	http://www.seanet.com/~karllunt/easyemb.htm

By default, aumix uses /dev/mixer (which on my system is linked to
/dev/mixer0).  I simply had to use aumix's -d flag to point to
/dev/mixer1.

Now to decide on a pair of speakers to replace my Pinnacles with the
rotted out surrounds :-)

Cheers,
-d

On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 at 14:13 -0700, Dhruva B. Reddy soliloquized thusly:
> I have an ancient Toshiba laptop (a 2515CDS) on which I just installed
> Debian 3.0 (I'm trying to turn it into a media player for the living room).
> I selected the 2.6 kernel (Debian stable comes with 2.6.8), as the
> installer froze on HW detection with the default kernel.
> 
> The installer found the sound card OK, but it used the OSS opl2sa3
> driver.  It works, but volume at which it plays is very low.  I've
> fixed this in the past by installing aumix.  I tried that this time, but
> when I try to run it, it exits with an exit code of 1 and the following
> message:
> 
>  aumix:  SOUND_MIXER_READ_DEVMASK
> 
> Which turns out to be a macro in /usr/include/linux/soundcard.h.  I
> wrote a program that spits out the value of this and got the following:
> 
> SOUND_MIXER_READ_DEVMASK: -2147201538
> 
> Before I remembered aumix, I tried (unsuccessfully, but not very hard) to
> install the ALSA drivers.
> 
> So I have a couple of questions at this point:
> 
> 	* I realize OSS is deprecated, but it seems to support my
> 	  ancient ISA sound card with lot less hassle than ALSA.  Is there a
> 	  better way to make my card work well?
> 	* If aumix is still the way to go, can anyone tell me what might
> 	  be happening when I try to run it?
> 
> Thanks,
> Dhruva

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