Arch Linux

Dreameen

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-09-06

Posts: 252

How to upgrade to the newest alsa-driver?

Hi,

I think I've tried everything..I've been messing around with alsa a lot today. Here's the list of things I've tried and the encoutered problems:

1)Install alsa-driver package from repo. Not possible due to the package being outdated, it tries to install files to /lib/modules/2.4.30 which is quite odd,
2)Edit the alsa-driver PKGBUILD and build the newest ver. of alsa-driver with makepkg. Failed. The package is built correctly, but there is a problem with inserting *any* of the alsa modules. Modprobe complains about some unknown symbols and yes, I did run depmod -a before inserting the module. Not even rebooting seems to solve this problem. I get a whole bunch of errors like this when trying to insert the modules:

Jun 26 20:33:55 DreaM snd_pcm: Unknown symbol snd_device_register
Jun 26 20:33:55 DreaM snd_pcm: Unknown symbol snd_register_device
Jun 26 20:33:55 DreaM snd_pcm: Unknown symbol snd_info_get_line
Jun 26 20:33:55 DreaM snd_mixer_oss: Unknown symbol snd_info_register
Jun 26 20:33:55 DreaM snd_mixer_oss: Unknown symbol snd_info_free_entry
Jun 26 20:33:55 DreaM snd_mixer_oss: Unknown symbol snd_info_get_str
Jun 26 20:33:55 DreaM snd_mixer_oss: Unknown symbol snd_unregister_oss_device
Jun 26 20:33:55 DreaM snd_mixer_oss: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_find_id
Jun 26 20:33:55 DreaM snd_mixer_oss: Unknown symbol snd_verbose_printk

My /var/log/messages has quickly swollen from ~300 K to ~11MB...duh :?

3)I've recompiled kernel several times trying every possible combination of building alsa(as a module, disabled etc..). It seems that the only working configuration was the initial one, when alsa was built into the kernel. Unfortunately, the kernel sources still have the old ver. of alsa-driver.

So, my final question is: How do you upgrade to the newest alsa-1.0.9b in Arch? Is it even possible? :evil:

Beavis

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2005-01-01

Posts: 71

Re: How to upgrade to the newest alsa-driver?

I had a lot of the issues you're getting as well and the only way I got it to work was to completely disable alsa in the kernel, recompile it and then upgrade the kernel.

Once that was done I compiled alsa-driver through abs and then installed it and it all worked fine. OSS was disabled as well but don't know if that made a difference or not. It appears that alsa has a module called snd_pcm_oss which acts as an OSS emulation layer through alsa so I don't think you will need OSS at all. (At least I think thats how it works)

After that I just followed the wiki guide to setup the rest of alsa.