OSS

Open Sound System (OSS) v4 is an alternative to ALSA as a layer 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
Currently there is no maintained ebuild in portage for this software.

Ebuild
There are many more or less active overlays for ebuilds. Most of them require layman to have git or mercurial support:

angelos-overlay
angelos-overlay seems pretty up to date and maintained by a Gentoo developer. <3 Christoph To use it:

oss-overlay
This overlay is quiet outdated but might become more recent in the future.

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.

bug report
Ebuilds can also be found in, which would need to be added to the local overlay

Install
Build the modules and add to the default runlevel:

Configuration
General configuration after install.

Compatibility

 * Many application only provide support for ALSA, therefore it is a good idea to keep both USE flags

OSS will create ALSA devices for those applications.


 * to be able to use OSS4 with GNOME or other gstreamer dependent desktop environments like xfce4. Once again, which is included in ! was dropped from the official tree, so you will have to make your own ebuild (quite easy for this one) or else grab one somewhere (bar-overlay, for example).

CMI878x
Unlike ALSA, OSS4 has fewer complex options to configure, so you won't need any `soundon.user'. Especially if your setup isn't complex or are using 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 (default card). And then, insert a few lines correcting devices nodes which can be 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 OSS4 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 several comandline tools and one gtk-GUI to configure the devices.

osstest
Maybe it just works, test all audio devices with the following command:

ossxmix
ossxmix is the graphical tool to configure devices:
 * Oss_ossxmix.png

External Resources

 * configuring applications for OSSv4
 * building OSSv4 from source