[Techtalk] Alsa question

[Patricia Fraser]

Hi,

> hi patricia
> i've been struggling with vaguely similiar things since discovering that
> mandrake has its own alsa and devfs - which makes installing 0.9 from
> source fun and games..... anyhow....
>
> afaik you can install both of the alsa *libs*.... i did this by rpm -i
> rather than rpm -Uvh.... should install alongside rather than upgrade
> packages (please correct me if i'm wrong on this!)....

No, you're completely right - it wouldn't work the first time (still don't 
know why it choked) but it worked fine the next time. I used urpmi to install 
the 0.9 mandrake libs rpm, and it required libalsa-data, but then said 
"install without checking dependencies?" & I said yes, and it installed fine; 
and then I installed libalsa-data with urpmi, and it went in fine; and then 
mplayer needed a couple other things which I found and installed (liblirc and 
libdvd) and now mplayer is working a treat! (I also had to download the win32 
codecs from the mplayer site, and I'm still missing the fonts but it works 
without them - I'll get 'em in the middle of the night while I'm cooking food 
for Christmas... too hot to cook in the daytime!)

> other possibility is to install alsa-lib from source but i'd really
> advise *against* this if you're using mdk rpms.... its a last ditch
> thing and can really fsck up your alsa because of the way mdk uses
> devfs.... i'm just in the process of untangling 0.9rc5 alsa modules from
> mandrakes supplied 0.9rc2 modules.... erk......

Argh! You're way ahead of me. I'm not using alsa for general sound, because 
a) I've got this weird onboard sound chip (I forget its name) which I can't 
seem to make do midi with alsa, and b) I've put my old SB16 card in and got 
it working with the OSS stuff (which I know how to set up). Oh for 32-hour 
days...

I'm also finding Mdk is a bit "out there" with its messing with things. I 
think sometime next year it'll be time to try Debian, and learn how things 
orta be, before I start trying to understand what Mdk is doing to all the 
basics - I'm still getting my head around devfsd!

Cheers,

-- 
Trish Fraser, Sunbury, Australia
trish at thefrasers.org
www.computerbank.org.au