How To Install alsa-oss on Debian 9
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install alsa-oss on Debian 9.
What is alsa-oss
alsa-oss is:
This package contains a program loader, aoss, which wraps applications written for OSS in a compatibility library, thus allowing them to work with ALSA.
There are two ways of getting an application to work with ALSA if the application was written for OSS. The first way is to load the special ALSA drivers that emulate the OSS kernel interface; these allow the application to open /dev/dsp0 and other OSS device files. The second way is to wrap the application in the libaoss library provided in this package; the wrapper causes the application to access native ALSA device files such as /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c instead of OSS device files.
Use of the alsa-oss library is recommended over the use of OSS-emulation drivers if you want to use ALSA’s PCM plugin layer.
ALSA is the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.
OSS is the free version of the Open Sound System.
There are three methods to install alsa-oss on Debian 9. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install alsa-oss Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install alsa-oss using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install alsa-oss
Install alsa-oss Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install alsa-oss using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install alsa-oss
Install alsa-oss Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install alsa-oss using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install alsa-oss
How To Uninstall alsa-oss on Debian 9
To uninstall only the alsa-oss package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove alsa-oss
Uninstall alsa-oss And Its Dependencies
To uninstall alsa-oss and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 9, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove alsa-oss
Remove alsa-oss Configurations and Data
To remove alsa-oss configuration and data from Debian 9 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge alsa-oss
Remove alsa-oss configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove alsa-oss configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge alsa-oss
Dependencies
alsa-oss have the following dependencies:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install alsa-oss package on Debian 9 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.