glfs/multimedia/libdriv/alsa.xml
Mark Hymers f45b195302 Initial revision
git-svn-id: svn://svn.linuxfromscratch.org/BLFS/trunk/BOOK@3 af4574ff-66df-0310-9fd7-8a98e5e911e0
2002-07-07 20:28:42 +00:00

39 lines
1.6 KiB
XML

<sect1 id="alsa" xreflabel="alsa-&alsa-version;">
<?dbhtml filename="alsa.html" dir="multimedia"?>
<title>alsa-&alsa-version;</title>
<para>The first question which people tend to ask about ALSA is why they
should use it over the sound drivers included in the kernel - there are
several reasons. Firstly, the ALSA drivers support more sound cards
than those in the kernel. Secondly, the OSS emulation is in some cases
faster and better than the original OSS driver itself. And finally, there are
some programs which can use ALSA's enhanced features to better drive the
soundcard.</para>
<para>ALSA is also likely to be the future of Linux Sound (hence the
name <emphasis>Advanced Linux Sound Architecture</emphasis>), and the
ALSA drivers will probably be included into the main linux kernel at
some point during the 2.5 development series, leading eventually to ALSA
being the "standard" sound drivers into the future 2.6 stable
kernel.</para>
<para>You currently need to decide whether to use the 0.5.x series or
the 0.9-beta series. At the moment, if you use the 0.9.x drivers, some
older software will fail to compile with ALSA support. This is because
there is a new API in the 0.9.x series which isn't yet widely supported.
In these cases it is usually possible just to use the OSS driver
emulation which ALSA supplies (which can be superior to the OSS drivers
themselves). We don't recommend one ALSA series over the other
as there are advantages to both versions, however you should probably
use the latest point release of whichever series you decide to
use.</para>
&alsa-intro;
&alsa-desc;
&alsa-inst;
&alsa-config;
&alsa-cards;
</sect1>