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
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?
ReplyDeleteI am interested in taking forward securevista.net please read my comment.
thank you
cheers.
Joel
i followed the guide but after reboot it said "no volume control device available"
ReplyDeleteit was working fine with ALSA
I'm having trouble with my current drivers. I have a creative audigy 2zs soundcard, which worked well in Feisty Fawn (Alsa). In Gutsy however, I'm experiencing some difficulties. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't work at all. I'm afraid this OSS-driver won't help me. I don't dare to try it.
ReplyDeleteThis is great, thanks a log! Hopefully this will improve the sound out of my laptop a little
ReplyDeleteworked as a charm, only thing now is to get sound playing on both soundcards at the same time, so I don't need to change every time. any tips on this matter?
ReplyDeletethanks, greatly appreciated!
Hi - this didn't work for me. Lots of errors during .deb install (locked device, too fast to see). No sound on start-up, no sound after sudo soundon... tested an mp3 in xmms and looks like it's playing at 3X speed. Any ideas, or should I uninstall?? Feisty installed. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteAdjusting my sound preferences, i found i had selected the alsa sound device for some previous recording. trying to install again...
ReplyDeleteSorry, i have to go back to ALSA, just commenting out the ban list. I can't uninstall oss because of the broken installation, to reinstall it properly. The sound i have now is OK, just for mp3s and cds. Might work better for me on my next clean isntall...
ReplyDeleteThere's one thing I think all tutorials like this should include: How to get your system back to what it was before you tried to make any changes. Or is there an EASY way to do it already?
ReplyDeleteI've had to get a newer version of OSS4 from their website, but I've had no luck with installing it from the deb package. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can fix this?
ReplyDeleteSee the following:
root@desktop:~/Downloads# dpkg -i oss-linux_v4.0-1009_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 122573 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace oss-linux v4.0-1009 (using oss-linux_v4.0-1009_i386.deb) ...
sh: Can't open /usr/lib/oss/scripts/restore_drv.sh
dpkg: warning - old pre-removal script returned error exit status 2
dpkg - trying script from the new package instead ...
sh: Can't open /usr/lib/oss/scripts/restore_drv.sh
dpkg: error processing oss-linux_v4.0-1009_i386.deb (--install):
subprocess new pre-removal script returned error exit status 2
Building OSS Modules for Linux-unknown 2.6.22-14-generic
cd: 3: can't cd to /usr/lib/oss/build
sh: Can't open install.sh
Starting Open Sound System
/usr/sbin/soundon: 27: cannot create /usr/lib/oss/logs/soundon.log: Directory nonexistent
cat: /usr/lib/oss/version.dat: No such file or directory
/usr/sbin/soundon: 28: cannot create /usr/lib/oss/logs/soundon.log: Directory nonexistent
/usr/sbin/soundon: 30: cannot create /usr/lib/oss/logs/soundon.log: Directory nonexistent
/usr/sbin/soundon: 32: cannot create /usr/lib/oss/logs/soundon.log: Directory nonexistent
/usr/sbin/soundon: 38: cannot create /usr/lib/oss/logs/soundon.log: Directory nonexistent
/usr/sbin/soundon: 38: cannot create /usr/lib/oss/logs/soundon.log: Directory nonexistent
/usr/sbin/soundon: 45: cannot create /usr/lib/oss/logs/soundon.log: Directory nonexistent
No /usr/lib/oss/etc/installed_drivers - cannot continue
Errors were encountered while processing:
oss-linux_v4.0-1009_i386.deb
Thanks in advance!
this sucks. dont try this.
ReplyDeletei dont have sound anymore after trying this (which left me with no sound) and trying to remove the OSS files.
ryan, if you followed this guy's instructions then just remove what you blacklisted. I too tried installing this and according to 4force, my intel card is supported. I got the same errors as dan, above. i also attempted to remove the alsa-base package, but synaptic wants to remove ubuntu-minimal along with it, and that's a bad idea.. i haven't been able to find a post on ubuntuforums either...
ReplyDeleteI have 2 different sound cards and the default Ubuntu install wasn't configuring sound correctly (I have a new sound blaster and an older M Audio audiophile 24/96). I wanted to just use the m audio for audio in linux, and this did the trick perfectly. Thanks!
ReplyDelete@Dan:
ReplyDeleteOpen up the deb package with file-roller, and there will be an archive inside called data.tar.gz. Open that and inside there will be the folders "/usr/lib/oss". Copy the contents into the same folder on your harddrive and oss-linux will remove properly now under apt. Hackish, I know.
The above instructions no longer work. ALSA has to be disabled BEFORE installing otherwise the install script dies as it tries to disable the ALSA modules and fails, preventing itself from extracting all its contents.
Basically this means taht you have to do the blacklisting first, rebooting without and sound and then installing the deb package. If it doesn't works for you it will at least uninstall problem free without the above stated hack.
@anonymous:
ReplyDeleteIt appears you can undo the changes made by this tutorial by just uncommenting the stuff you commented out in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and reboot. (Yes, you could probably avoid the reboot with a lot of 'rmmod'ing and 'modprobe'ing, but that's too complicated to explain here.) ALSA doesn't get uninstalled or anything just because you installed the 'oss-linux' package unless you did it yourself.
@dan, others: It seems you need to have at least 'build-essentials' installed prior to installing the oss-linux .deb for it to be able to create the modules for your particular kernel.
I ran into the same problem (oss-linux wouldn't install/uninstall), so I followed the steps suggested by this Ubuntu forums article before installing oss-linux. However, even after installing 'build-essential', I still couldn't install 'oss-linux' and no amount of 'dpkg --purge'ing or 'apt-get install -f'ing would allow uninstall it.
So then... I used the instructions in 4Front forum topic #2054 for manually removing the oss-linux package's state information from apt's data files and cache directory, and repeated the 'dpkg -i oss-linux*' step, after which everything seemed to work fine.
I guess I can't be too upset about the oss-linux package not figuring out all that crap by itself, because it was created from a non-native (RPM) package by "alien," so it doesn't have all the nice pre- and post- wizardry of a real Debian package.
@Kevin:
ReplyDeleteThanks 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 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 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