Tortix and Caldera: Getting the best of both PCs
- 01.05.2012 :: Well, I used to have a different policy when it came to "publishing" things to my own site. I only wanted to post full, well thought out pieces of writing that I could be proud of Then again, this is really meant to be a personal blog to record what awesome things I deem (or feel) are necessary to record. This is especially true when it comes to accomplishing tasks in my various GNU/Linux environments. So, to hell with formality, I say!
- 09.01.2010 :: Solved my issue with OSS' lack of support for Caldera's onboard audio chip. This was very unfortunate since OSS had always been better than ALSA as a choice for a sound system. In this case, it saved my ass and made me so happy. The 'issue' I speak of pertains to a change in how the manufacturer of motherboards can now develop their own unique configurations for their audio hardware. This is better explained by the creators of OSS themselves here or for the lazy: "The Intel HDA mixer is a new type of mixer that doesn't have the normal volume controls found on AC97 or legacy SB devices. The HDA mixer presents a concept of Jacks and you can configure any jack to be either an output or an input jack." I was even able to verify that, while using OSS, every port was set to be output, even the mic (pink) and line-in (blue) ports.
This was very saddening. I was also becoming very frustrated. Then I went to the ASUS website to see if they had some kind of open-source audio driver (I mean, everyone's doing it these days! Quality varies, but at least they're trying). I came to find out that they did but that it was an ALSA module... but that's when it dawned on me: they created it! That must mean that it works or at least better than the work done by the OSS team. So, with this idea in mind I set out to switch my system back over to ALSA after switching back to OSS just to get sound to work again!! Even with this thinking I made the switch again but this time, as with most repeated processes in linux, it was much easier. I followed the process for installing and setting up my kernel from here, minus using
alsaconf. Essentially, I configured the kernel to have ALSA modularized, installedalsa-toolsandalsa-utils, and then let/etc/init.d/alsasoundtake care of the rest.Now, the reason for me to do such a thing? The reason for me to toil and complain so much? All because I wanted to have my Windows PC's audio be piped into my Gentoo box. Now, Some may say I'm just crazy but this has real tangible, awesome features. With the previous setup, I had the headphones on permanent gaming duty. This was fine for a while but eventually the need... the desire for speakers while gaming hit me. Now I could've just settled and used the speaker feature on my KVM which would allow the 'active' computer to have the speakers, but I wanted to do one better, I wanted to be able to manage audio from both PCs at the same time. This meant that I could have a video games volume on low and my music playing at a louder level, but then on-the-fly, change it so the game is louder without having to alt+tab.