Reason to move from alsa to oss v4:
- Includes a transparent software mixer (vmix) in kernel space. This means multiple applications can access the sound device at the same time without problems.
- The vmix mixer controls allow you to adjust the volume of each application individually.
- Better support for some sound card models, for example for the Creative X-Fi.
- Sound quality is usually better.
- Better support for applications written for the OSS API, of course. The OSS API is widely spread and a lot of applications support it. The ALSA's OSS API emulation, however, is often buggy.
First head over to the Open Sound System website and grab the package for your plaform. Now we need to install some packages before we install OSS v4. Do the following:
sudo apt-get install build-essential sed gawk libtool libgtk2.0-dev binutils gcc libsdl1.2debian-all libesd0 libsox-fmt-oss mpg123 gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad libasound2-plugins
After those packages install lets hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and drop to the terminal. If you dont already have it installed, make sure you install htop.
sudo apt-get install htop
Now lets run htop and kill gdm in the process list.
sudo htop
After gdm has been killed its time to install OSS v4. Do so with the following command:
sudo dpkg -i oss-linux-4.0-1016_amd64.deb
* Note: package name will vary all depending on your machine architecture *
OSS v4 will start building the sound modules and once done detect your card. This is optional but lets reconfigure linux-sound-base to use OSS instead of Alsa.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-sound-base
Then choose OSS and your done. Reboot your machine and OSS will start automatically. To setup your mixer settings you can use OSS v4's gui mixer with the following command:
ossxmix
And to save your mixer settings you can use the following command:
savemixer