On Sat April 10 2004 21:56, nick wrote:
> On April 10, 2004 02:22 pm, Curtis Sloan wrote:
> > I don't use Gentoo, but I do compile the most recent ALSA source releases
> > in addition to the kernel driver (can't get enough bleeding edge ;-)
>
> Which would be a good reason to use gentoo. ;-D

Touch�.  :-)  I am not opposed at all to using Gentoo; my two outstanding 
reasons for not using are:  1) I only have a PIII 450MHz w/ 256MB RAM and 
compiling WINE alone takes two hours, and 2) I can be unsettlingly lazy 
sometimes (i.e. untested binary packages are my friends sometimes).  ;-D

Feel free to refute either of these reasons and you may convert me, especially 
point 1.  ;-)
>
<snip>
> >
> > Does having an ALSA USE flag on Gentoo mean for the kernel, or for
> > compiling ALSA separately?  Sorry for not being "hip" and in-the-know
> > about Gentoo.  ;-D
>
> Actually it tells emerge [gentoo package manager] to add in ALSA support to
> packages which have it as a compile-time option. That in turn causes ALSA
> to become a necessary dependancy, hence it gets compiled.

Caveat emptor with me not being a Gentoo expert, but I would expect that this 
is where ALSA source releases such as alsa-libs and alsa-oss are being called 
upon (to be compiled).  Those two packages don't require the configured Linux 
kernel source to compile, but they do need to find an already compiled ALSA 
driver (and alsa-driver requires compiled kernel source :-P).  So there may 
be a bit of a 'chicken and the egg' scenario happening for you.  Of course 
this is strictly conjecture, since I'm speaking of source tarball compiles, 
and not emerge packages.

> When I said I 
> injected it that means I told it ALSA was installed, which it was, but in a
> different way. Kinda confusing, esp if another package needs the ALSA
> source to be able to compile.

Maybe not a bad thing, if you did already have some alsa-lib, alsa-oss and 
alsa-utils portage packages installed (compiled?  What do Gentooers say, 
anyway? ;-) previously.  If not, that could be where things are going south.

I think the sometimes confusing part is that "ALSA" is now included in the 
kernel (as of 2.6), but all this refers to is alsa-driver.

<snip>
>
> So I still need alsa-lib, but alsa-driver is in the kernel?

Yup.  Here's the skinny:

o alsa-driver:  available in 2.6 kernel.  Available separately as well, but 
requires the "configured" kernel sources to compile correctly (from the ALSA 
documentation).

This might be your problem -- the kernel sources need to be "configured", 
which I translate as meaning "compiled once" (make bzImage && make modules at 
least; an unpacked Linux kernel source tarball is not enough).

o alsa-libs:  AFAIK, the libs are only needed for other programs (but not to 
access the driver).  I really should look into it deeper.  Caveat emptor, but 
I say think of it as a *-devel type RPM.

o alsa-utils:  are really only for setting your mixer settings -- especially 
the first time, since all channels are muted by default.  Maybe other 
programs can work around this by using the OSS Mixer API -- I'm not sure.

o alsa-oss:  OSS compatibility library.  It's still important to have OSS 
emulation from ALSA for a number of programs (a lot of id Software games come 
to mind ;-).

So, at the end of the day, you still need all four, but nowadays one is 
provided via the kernel (alsa-driver).

HTH,
Curtis

_______________________________________________
clug-talk mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca

Reply via email to