FAQ011

From the ALSA wiki

The FAQs have been reorganized. The new location of this question is FAQ#How can I find out whether I have OSS emulation modules loaded?

How can I find out whether I have OSS emulation modules loaded?

To find out whether ALSA's OSS emulation modules are loaded, use these commands (please use cut-and-paste!):

lsmod | awk '$1~/oss/ || NR==1'

If ALSA's OSS emulation modules are loaded, you should see output similar to the following:

Module Size Used by Not tainted snd-seq-oss 24930 0 (autoclean) (unused) snd-mixer-oss 11094 1 (autoclean) [snd-pcm-oss] snd-pcm-oss 38862 0 (autoclean) (unused)

If no OSS emulation modules are loaded, you should see just:

Module Size Used by Not tainted

in which case you may want to load the OSS emulation modules by using the commands:

echo snd-seq-oss snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss | xargs -n 1 modprobe

If that doesn't work, it means you probably do not have OSS emulation enabled in ALSA and will have to recomplile ALSA with the OSS emulation option for the configure script enabled.

If you see no output with the commands above you can look in /proc/asound/oss/sndstat. You should see devices noted below "Audio devices:" if OSS emulation is working.

ALSA's OSS emulation modules are for OSSemulation and provide the OSS devices. They are harmless and do not interfere with the normal operation of ALSA. If you need OSS emulation, load the OSS emulation modules; if you don't, leave them alone.

Don't confuse the ALSA "OSS emulation modules" with the non-ALSA "OSS sound driver modules". See FAQ010 for a full explanation of these modules and FAQ029 for the answer to "How can I find out whether I have OSS sound driver modules loaded?".