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- a functional Linux system (e.g. the Slackware distribution), with the "Development"
packages installed (i.e. gcc, make etc.)
- some knowledge about Linux (meaning you know how to use "ls", "cd", "tar"
etc.)
- a root-account
The great thing is: you don't need a supported sound card anymore, as ALSA now has a dummy driver that does nothing!
(No, it really does nothing, but some programs will work now that they believe there is a sound card available).
If you have a PnP card, you will also need:
- the isapnptools software package.
The INSTALL text in the driver directory suggests that for some cards, PnP
support is native. I also received a suggestion from Jaroslav about this.
When I get further information about this topic I will add it to this
mini-HOWTO.
Please note that you should not have any sound drivers active when you want
to use the ALSA drivers. If you have a kernel with sound drivers compiled
in, you'll need a kernel recompilation. If you have the old "sound.o" module
active, you need to deactivate it. If you use kerneld, this probably means
deleting sound.o from the /lib/modules/<kernel_version>/misc directory.
Newer RedHat systems have a different
sound approach, with several sound modules active. You need to deactivate
them all.
The 2.2 series kernel has a new approach to sound. You should include sound support here ! Yep, that's
right: you add sound support to the kernel, but do not include any sound card. Then compile and install
the kernel and after that, compile the ALSA-drivers.
The ALSA drivers are available from
ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/
and there are mirrors at
For a fully functional ALSA-installation, you will need the driver, the
libs and the utilities; e.g if you chose the A2000 mirror you would
get ftp://linux.a2000.nl/alsa/driver/alsa-driver-0.4.1e.tar.gz, ftp://linux.a2000.nl/alsa/lib/alsa-lib-0.4.1d.tar.gz
and ftp://linux.a2000.nl/alsa/utils/alsa-utils-0.4.1.tar.gz
The ALSA drivers have come a long way. Development started during the 2.0 version kernel,
then the 2.2 series showed up (with their own sound kernel).
As the 0.4 versions work perfectly for me, I think it is safe to use 0.4.1e (or newer, if you want). If you have a 2.0.x kernel,
you will definately not want to use 0.3.0 or later. Instead, use alsa-driver-0.3.0-pre4, alsa-lib-0.3.0-pre4
and alsa-utils-0.3.0-pre3.
The older versions, 0.2.0-pre10p3 and older do work under 2.0.x, but I cannot get them to work under 2.2.x (probably
due to the lack of interfacing with the soundcore module of the kernel).
You extract the drivers by some reasonable command, like the all-time tar
-zxf <file>. Most likely you would do that in the /usr/src directory, so you need root priviliges for this.
Type ``su'' and then the root password to become root. But please note: it is unwise to use your system as the ``root''
user if it is not necessary. So:
cd /usr/src
tar -zxf ~/alsa-driver-0.4.1e.tar.gz
tar -zxf ~/alsa-lib-0.4.1d.tar.gz
tar -zxf ~/alsa-utils-0.4.1.tar.gz
Also working and more fun: find ~ -name alsa* -exec tar -zxf {} \;
(Don't try this at home kids, it's just an example). Note that when downloading
the drivers with Netscape, you may accidentally get unpacked drivers with
a ".tgz" extension. If tar complains about the file format, you may get
better results by leaving off the "z" in the tar options.
You need the drivers before you can compile and use the libs. You need
the libs before you can compile or use the utils. So let's begin:
cd alsa-driver-0.4.1e
(and for those not so experienced: try typing a <tab> (the "tab"-key)
after "alsa-d". That's called command line completion.)
./configure
If you want to use the built-in PnP interfacing, you should use
./configure --with-isapnp=yes
make
Now you need to be 'root' to install the stuff (you probably were "root"
already)
make install
If this tells you that something like ``version.h'' cannot be found, then you probably do not have
a proper kernel source tree. You need a couple of files of your kernel source to be able to
compile the ALSA-drivers. Unpack your favorite linux-2.x.y.tar.gz in /usr/src, and issue a
make menuconfig. (Actually, make symlinks may be enough).
Now compile the libraries:
cd ../alsa-lib-0.4.1d
./configure
make
make install
OK, you're getting it, the utilities:
cd ../alsa-utils-0.4.1
./configure
make
make install
Note: you can leave out the "make install" for the utilities at first.
You could even leave out the whole library-making and utility-making, just
to check if the driver works.
There is a script in the driver-directory that will install the ALSA-sound-devices
in your /dev directory. Type
./snddevices
from the driver-directory. There should be a /dev/snd subdirectory now
(test if it is there. If you are not familiar with even the "ls" command,
please consider reading other HOWTO's first. You should have some basic
Linux knowledge to install these drivers).
Now you're ready to insert the driver, so please turn over to the next
paragraph.
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