ALSA
From Mandrivausers Wiki
ALSA (an acronym for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is a Linux kernel component intended to replace the original Open Sound System (OSS) for providing drivers for sound cards. Some of the goals of the ALSA project were to support automatic configuration of sound card hardware, and graceful handling of multiple sound devices in a system. A couple of different frameworks such as JACK use ALSA to perform low latency professional grade audio editing and mixing.
In Mandriva, ALSA is used by default as the sound system.
[edit] ALSA features
ALSA was designed to be able to use some features that, at the time of its conception, were not supported by the alternative technology (OSS):
- Hardware based MIDI synthesis
- Hardware mixing of multiple channels
- Full duplex operation
- Multiprocessor friendly, thread-safe drivers
To provide these features cleanly, it has a bigger and more complex API than OSS, so it can be harder to develop applications that use ALSA as their sound technology. However, ALSA also provides an optional OSS emulation layer, so the simpler and more portable OSS API can be used.
[edit] Configuration
One of the most useful configuration tools for alsa is alsaconf, which requires root privileges and requires unfettered access to the sound system. Make sure all programs which might use sound are closed (including KMix in the task tray) and then from a console as root, type
alsaconf
It doesn't seem to require much in the way of input for the configuration, but it makes a best attempt to set things up according to the hardware it finds.
