Install ALSA

  Install alsa

 

  Last week, I borrowed a IBM 600E, it's very old, main frequency is 400MHz, memery has only 64M spaces. I installed Red Hat Linux 8.0 in it, most time, I only use the text interface, if start X, it will run slowly.

  Today, I want to install mplayer in it, and finially succeed, I spend lot of time doing that. Now I'll record the critical steps here.

 

  Sound was the biggest problem, the system can recognize the sound card, but there is no driver. Alsa is a good choice.

  ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is a powerful solution for linux sound system including sound cards driver, development libs and so on. It can be downloaded from www.alsa-project.org.

  Three packages were needed: alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-util. Alsa-driver must be installed first, and then alsa-lib, alsa-util should be the last one.

  Installation was very simple, just type "configure","make" and "make install". I like to install all the appended software to a seperated path, so I add parameters to command configure like this:

./configure --prefix=/apps

then the software will be installed to /apps/.

  During making period, there appeared a error, it happened while compiling files in usb/ directory, I thought that part was not useful, so modified Makefile, forbid it to compile usb/. Soon compiling and linking completed.

  Whiling installing alsa-util there appeared another problem: libasound.so can't be found. libasound.so was made by alsa-lib. Because I install alsa-lib to /apps, so alsa-util can't find it. Then I modified LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH, but there is no use, alsa-lib didn't add any information to pkg_config, and alsa-util only searched libraries in default path(/usr/lib), then I had to reinstall alsa-lib to default lacation.

  After installation, u need to configure the sound card. In package alsa-util there are several useful tools. You can use alsaconf to detect the sound card and specify the driver, and then use alsamixer to set the volume.

  Now, the sound card was well configured.