OSS

Open Sound System

About

The Open Sound System is the traditional interface for making and capturing sound on Unix based operating systems. The Open Sound System was created in 1992 by the Finn Hannu Savolainen, and was designed to provide an interface that application developers can used for controlling differing types of sound controller hardware. The OSS core provided the underlying sound architecture in Linux prior to the 2.6 series. It is a free subset of a commercially available product by 4Front Technologies

In the 2.6 kernel OSS was replaced the ALSA architecture, however development of the OSS core continues, as it is still the preferred sound system by many users and developers. The OSS core may still be installed as an optional component.

Benefits of the Open Sound System

• The open sound system is cross platform
• The open sound system provides a relatively simple application interface
• The open sound system provides a small footprint
• The open sound system provides improved performance over ALSA
• The open sound system provides high quality sound
• The open sound system is well documented

Disadvantages of the Open Sound System

• Many current applications designed to run on Linux are written only for ALSA

Building the OSS sound core from source code

Obtain the latest stable source tarball for the OSS package

• OSS Stable Releases
• OSS Current Testing Release

Make the source directory current

cd /usr/src

Extract the source tarball

bunzip2 -c ~/oss-v4.0-build1015-src-gpl.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -

Create a build directory and make it current

mkdir ~/oss
cd ~/oss

Create a fakeroot environment

fakeroot

Run the configure script

The configure script currently supplied with the open sound system must be invoked using a full pathname. An error will occur during build, if a relative pathname is used.

/usr/src/oss-v4.0-build1015-src-gpl/configure

Run the make utility

make build

Exit the fakeroot environment

exit

The kernel modules are built during the installation phase of this package. It is necessary to gain root privileges to complete the installation of the OSS sound system:

su root
make install
exit

Testing the OSS sound system

Errors During Build

Error: Too many levels of symbolic links

This error may occur when the configure script is being run within a subdirectory of the project directory:

# This may produce an error
cd ~/oss-v4.1-build*-src-gpl
mkdir build
cd build
../configure

This produces an error:

../build/cmd/.config: Too many levels of symbolic links

Resolution

Use a build directory outside of the current project directory:

cd ~/
mkdir oss
cd oss
../oss-v4.1-build*-src-gpl/configure

Error: No such file or directory

The configure script must be invoked using a full pathname. This error occurs, if a relative pathname is used.

Scanning .
Scanning ./cmd
Scanning ./cmd/ossdevlinks
./cmd/ossdevlinks/ossdevlinks.c: No such file or directory

Resolution

Invoke the configure script with a full pathname.