[Mageia-dev] OSS sound support

Sun Feb 26 20:09:23 CET 2012

'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:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+