OSS

Open Sound System v4 is an alternative to ALSA as a laywer between programs and sound hardware. Users of v3 are encouraged to use the not so maintained v4 version which has a BSD and GPL-2 licences.

Installation
First off, you will have to have layman with mercurial support or add an overlay which have OSS ebuilds.

Bar-overlay
To add the bar-overlay to layman, please follow the instructions on bar-overlay There are USE flags in media-sound/oss::bar so that one can build selected drivers instead using the OSS_CARDS environment variable.

Configuration
Unlike ALSA, OSS has fewer complexity to configure, so you won't need any `soundon.user' if you don't have a complex set up or more than one sound card. In the latter case, you may want to keep a `soundon.user' file to be able to choose your first card ( first card equal default card) and then put a few line to correct devices nodes which can be a little problematic.

The previous script will check if there are devices nodes, so a sound card, with CMI878x driver and then relink almost everything to it or else use HDAudio.

Or else, create a file like `~/.scripts/soundon.user' and edit `/etc/init.d/oss' to your liking.

Now you can enjoy Open Sound System. I found the sound with OSS4 to be better than what I can get with ALSA. There was a time when my CMI878x sound works only with OSS but a few things changed.

OSS4 has its own mixer so using extra sound daemons like pulseaudio, esd etc. is not necessary.

Usage
OSS4 has a comandline tool and a gtk tool to configure the devices.

Troubleshooting

 * for compatibility issues with single applications, check Configuring Applications for OSSv4

External Resources
configuring applications for OSSv4 building OSSv4 from source