I tried to set up my ALSA with the gentoo manual. It didn't work because I didn't have oss in mz USE flags. This way the modules snd-mixer-oss and snd-pcm-oss were not built by "emerge "alsa-driver" and amixer said: amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such file or directory Would be a nice tiny hint to write in the manual Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Personally, I think that the oss emulation modules should be built regardless of whether or not OSS is in the USE flags. OSS is still used by many apps, but most people using ALSA probably would prefer to build a program with just ALSA support if they don't have the OSS USE flag set, but still want the emulation layers. Although for people familiar with portage it is easy to do a export USE=oss and then merge ALSA, it would be easier for most of the first time users if they didn't have to do that.
perhaps it should be suggested below as a note 'if you are getting errors blah blah blah try with oss in USE'
Are the errors persistant and reproduceable (i.e. do they _always_ appear if you don't have OSS on your system) or only on certain environments?
I agree with Mathew, enough to submit an alsa-driver bug http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28506 citing this report. ALSA is replacing OSS not using it, so it doesn't make sense to overload the 'building for OSS' USE flag.
I agree with spanky on this one. The user should then be notified that removing OSS-support can cause breakage to some sound-utilities, and that alsa-driver can compile OSS-emulation if OSS is in the USE-flag. See also my comment on the newly created bugreport.
See patch of bug #29854 which includes a paragraph about USE-flags.
This has recently been solved. Marking as fixed.
