Getting Alsa to work was our main focus this week

So far our Kernel seemed to compile fine. This was our biggest challenge on last week. During this week we have dedicated our effort towards getting the sound to work. We recompiled some of the modules needed to get Alsa working.

What is ALSA?

ALSA stands for the "Advanced Linux Sound Architecture". is a project to improve the Linux sound subsystem by rewriting large chunks of it. It is anticipated that at least parts of ALSA will make it into Linux 2.5.x as it becomes ready and as good as the existing components. In particular ALSA has a far superior GUS driver. For more details on the installation process click here

ALSA features:

• Full Duplex playback/recording, for all hardware that supports it.
• Hardware mixing of multiple audio streams, for hardware that supports it.
• Professional quality MIDI sequencing subsystem.
• Extensive mixer capabilities, to support advanced features of new soundcards.
• Patch handling system, for wavetable soundcards.
• Able to support ISA PnP soundcards without external PnP config program.
• Support for multiple soundcards in same system.
• All included drivers are open source in the ALSA package, although vendors may provide binary only drivers.

Other areas of focus:

Working with KDE was a bit of a challenge. When we ran startx, it worked fine until we changed it to start KDE. The main error we got was that it could not start kdeinit. This area is still under construction. We were also able to emerge freevo.