Get better sound in Ubuntu with the Brand new OSS 4!

Labels: , , Posted by defcon on Monday, October 29, 2007 at 12:39 AM

Hell yea, im excited to share this little howto! OSS Has enlightened my life and made my linux/unix experience more desirable, my volume is louder, my sound quality rocks, stereo is actually stereo, surround sound actually works now... I can enjoy more music more!
The OSS project was initially free software, but following the project's success, Savolainen started the company 4Front Technologies and made his support for newer sound devices and improvements proprietary. In response, the Linux community abandoned OSS and development effort switched to the replacement Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). Many free software operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD continued to distribute previous versions of OSS, and continued to maintain and improve these versions.

In July 2007, 4Front Technologies released sources for OSS under CDDL and GPL licenses, now OSS v4


Howto Install:
First lets download OSS 4:

wget http://www.4front-tech.com/release/oss-linux_v4.0-1008_i386.deb

Now lets install:
sudo dpkg -i oss-linux_v4.0-1008_i386.deb

Wow that was easy...
Now lets blacklist our slow/garbage ALSA drivers...
First we must locate those drivers with a simple cmd:
lsmod | grep snd

Thats it, now you should see a list of things starting with "snd"
Now lets open another terminal and:
sudo -s

Now lets blacklist the old drivers:
Ok now either use gedit or nano, I prefer mousepad but lets use nano :)
nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist


Now lets scroll all the way to the bottom of the file and blacklist our snd* drivers
You want your additions to look like this:
# blacklist alsa
blacklist snd_intel8x0
blacklist snd_ac97_codec
blacklist snd_pcm
blacklist snd_timer
blacklist snd


Make Sure you save the file :)

Basically we are done, other than a simple reboot and sudo soundon after reboot, mostly soundon isnt necessary.
sudo reboot

Have fun and enjoy your better sound drivers :)


References:
OSS Developers Blog
OSS Help Forum
Another Helpful OSS Howto
Great Install Directions and OSS tools

Comments (13)

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's avatar

· 909 weeks ago

Hi My Name is Joel. I left a comment in securevista.net and sent you an email to defcon@securevista.net did you get it?

I am interested in taking forward securevista.net please read my comment.

thank you

cheers.
Joel
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's avatar

· 909 weeks ago

i followed the guide but after reboot it said "no volume control device available"
it was working fine with ALSA
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's avatar

· 909 weeks ago

This is great, thanks a log! Hopefully this will improve the sound out of my laptop a little
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's avatar

· 909 weeks ago

Adjusting my sound preferences, i found i had selected the alsa sound device for some previous recording. trying to install again...
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's avatar

· 904 weeks ago

this sucks. dont try this.

i dont have sound anymore after trying this (which left me with no sound) and trying to remove the OSS files.
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's avatar

· 891 weeks ago

@Kevin:

Thanks for the update on the original article! I was installing using oss-linux_v4.0-1014_i386.deb, and ran into some issues. Also, the link to 4Front forum topic #2054 is <A HREF="http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=...REL="nofollow">here--it was incorrect in the original post.

@Everyone else:

Here are the modifications to the original guide...

Do this first: sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic linux-source build-essential

Then get the latest OSS v4: wget <a href="http://www.4front-tech.com/release/oss-linux_v4.0-1014_i386.deb

SKIP ">http://www.4front-tech.com/release/oss-linux_v4.0-1014_i386.deb

SKIP this step from the original article: sudo dpkg -i oss-linux_v4.0-1008_i386.deb"

Complete the rest of the original article...

After rebooting, NOW you can do this step: sudo dpkg -i oss-linux_v4.0-1008_i386.deb
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Jarav's avatar

Jarav · 881 weeks ago

Defcon,

WIll this work with Hardy? Pulseaudio gave me problems on Hardy and I went back to plain Alsa.
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brett's avatar

brett · 859 weeks ago

There is only one problem, and it is huge - the software requires re-installation after two years. The permanent license agreement cost US$50. I think I'll stick with ALSA. The point of open source is not to get screwed.
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codpawn's avatar

codpawn · 854 weeks ago

Ive done as you said
but with the oss-linux_v4.0-1016_i386.deb

which was available on the site

and ended up with no sound

can ya help me to configure

or get back to my alsa mixer

and iam on 8.10

your help will be appriciated!!
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October East's avatar

October East · 851 weeks ago

You need to update this wiki or take it down. On Ubuntu 8.10 the sound is crackly on most apps -- barely works at all with Amarok -- and despite lots of googling and tinkering, I can't get a peep of Flash 10 sound. Insult to injury, the thing seems to be impossible to uninstall, even with the instructions in the 4Front PDF. So I just copied my home directory to an external, and I get to waste several more hours reinstalling Ibex. Any alternative plans would be welcome - esp. if I haven't tried them yet!
1 reply · active 851 weeks ago
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October East's avatar

October East · 851 weeks ago

Update: to remove OSS from Ubuntu 8.10: Open a terminal, sudo -s to root, and type "soundoff" (without quotes). You'll get an error message about processes still running. Go to Gnome pulldown menu System > Admininistration > System Monitor. Find a process that resembles the error message, right click and kill it. Then try soundoff again. Then (for the DEB package) type or paste in: dpkg --purge oss-linux. After that completes, follow directions at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=805486

In case they're taken down, here's the helpful info from Markbuntu:

If you have these:

alsa-oss (alsa wrapper for OSS apps)
alsaplayer-alsa (PCM player for alsa)
alsa-utils (command line utilities)
asoundconf-gtk (choose default alsa sound card)
gnome-alsamixer (GUI alsa mixer for Gnome)
gstreamer0.10-alsa (gstreamer plugin)
xmms2-plugin-alsa (xmms2 plugin)

libasound2-plugins (jack, OSS, pulseaudio)

libesd-alsa0 Enlightened Sound Demon (allows multiple audio streams on one device)

You can get everything back into working order fairly quickly and without a lot of fuss.

First use asoundconf-gtk to set alsa default to your sound card then go to System/Preferences/Sound and set all the entries to alsa instead of automatic. Then open the gnome-alsamixer and turn everything on and put the volumes up and be sure to select mix. You might want to mute the microphone to prevent feedback.

Then reboot and everything should work.

That way everything is reset to go through alsa to your sound card. If you are using jack set the driver to alsa with jack control and the input and output to default for now though you may want to change that later. You can also check with the pulseaudio manager to make sure the default input and output sinks are set to alsa. They should be.
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sam's avatar

sam · 843 weeks ago

i am getting this error while installing, could anybody pls. help me out on this
oss-linux conflicts with libflashsupport
libflashsupport (version 1.9-0ubuntu1) is present and installed.
dpkg: error processing oss-linux-4.1-1051_i386.deb (--install):
conflicting packages - not installing oss-linux
Errors were encountered while processing:
oss-linux-4.1-1051_i386.deb
-Sam

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