Ubuntu Unleashed

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