4Front Open Sound System (OSS) installation - FreeBSD package

Intro and Preparation

OSS means Open Sound System. The FreeBSD default kernel statically links the NewPCM OSS driver from version 10. If you use FreeBSD 10 or newer, to avoid further conflict between 4Front vs. NewPCM drivers, please build your own kernel without audio support (you can use my example of how to do this).

Installation

Installation of the 4Front OSS driver is easy. Just install the oss package.

sudo pkg install oss

The pkgng will download at about 90 MiB from the repository and takes at about a half of GiB on the hard drive(s).

Do not forget to clean up the system after the installation.

sudo pkg clean

Enabling

To enable the 4Front OSS audio driver just add the next line to your /etc/rc.conf file and reboot the system.
oss_enable="YES"

cp /etc/rc.conf /etc/rc.conf ; echo 'oss_enable="YES" >> /etc/rc.conf ; reboot

Start OSS without rebooting

sudo service oss start

Test the sound system

The 4Front OSS has audio player, recorder, advanced mixer, detectors and a few other oss* utilities.
To test the OSS just enter the osstest command and listen a great piano music (what's the song is that? :-) ).

osstest

After OSS is installed you can use both mixer and ossmix utilities as an audio mixer.

ossmix

Volume level control

Libmatemixer does not work properly with OSS because it can not find any device to control. As a temporary fix you may want to put the next command to the MATE's auto start applications.

ossxmix -b

Sources

1. OSS/FreeBSD