Basically I'm proposing a variable that starts firefox with aoss, artsdsp, esddsp, etc. I'm trying to eliminate OSS completely, and this makes the flash plugin work, essentially. Currently doing "aoss firefox" accomplishes the same thing, but seeing as other distros already have a variable for this, and gentoo does similar things such as MOZILLA_NEWTYPE, I see no reason why this shouldn't be in mozilla-launcher. Other distros call the variable "FIREFOX_DSP" however I think MOZILLA_DSP is probably more appropriate. so something like export MOZILLA_DSP="aoss" firefox would start up firefox with aoss. Simple enough.
What is aoss? Could you give me some links to relevant documentation?
aoss basically converts OSS to alsa, but unlike the kernel oss emulation in alsa, it runs through alsa-lib and thus can pass through alsa plugins (good for dmixing and such) It is similar in concept to artsdsp or esddsp which convert oss to use esd or arts accordingly. They usually use LD_PRELOAD in a wrapper script, and you run for example "aoss firefox" and it'll just work, well most of the time anyway. There's always a few things it won't work with. It tends to work ok with the flash plugin and such. if there were native alsa output on flash and all the other plugins something like this would be completely unneccessary but because there isn't this is not a bad thing to have. here's an excerpt the man page: aoss is a simple wrapper script which facilitates the use of the ALSA OSS compatibility library. It just sets the appropriate LD_PRELOAD path and then runs the command. This is useful in cases where routing settings (which can be made in your .asoundrc file) need to be applied to commands that use the OSS API.
Thanks for the explanation. I'd rather not include it in mozilla-launcher because it has questionable value, and it's something additonal for me to support and track. I think it should be sufficient for administrators to either (1) call aoss firefox when they're starting the browser, or (2) create a wrapper: #!/bin/bash exec aoss /usr/bin/firefox "$@"
