[vox-tech] Re: Re: SoundBlaster 16 woes (Peter Jay Salzman)

[Nick Schmalenberger]

"Peter Jay Salzman" <p at dirac.org> said:
> You'll know if something is wrong.  I'm wondering if it's a kernel
> dependency bug?

Try ALSA. I have two systems with SoundBlaster 16 cards and they both
work nicely  with the ALSA drivers from kernel 2.6 . So maybe Pete
Salzman is right about a kernel problem. OSS is deprecated in 2.6 and I
guess there is a reason. I like at least how all the ALSA module names
start with snd- so you know what they are for. I'm not an expert, but it
seems better organized because of things like that, and there are alot
more cards supported. Apparently OSS has licensing problems which I
guess is why ALSA is more of a complete solution now. ALSA has OSS
emulation also, which is useful for things which haven't had much done
with them for a while and were written in the age of OSS.

Pete Salzman said the other day about Robert Scofield's problem that
compiling your own kernels is helpful in learning about the structure of
Linux, and I agree with him. I have learned alot from the kernel docs
and the help in the config. I also feel more distro independent and more
portable. I have a better understanding of what "Linux" really means
instead of a particular distributions interpretation. I've read about
the problems between AT&T and Berkeley UNIX in the 80s and the
differences between distros, especially the commercial ones, seem
similar.