Driver Compilation

Easy way

Use alsa-compile.sh script. See "alsa-compile.sh --help" for more details:

# wget -O alsa-compile.sh http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-compile.sh
# chmod 755 alsa-compile.sh
# ./alsa-compile.sh --help

Compile and insert new ALSA kernel modules:

# ./alsa-compile.sh --driver --kmodules

Compile and install new ALSA kernel modules to /lib/modules/`uname -r`/updates/alsa tree:

# ./alsa-compile.sh --driver --install

New modules can be removed from the /lib/modules tree with:

# ./alsa-compile.sh --kmodclean

Pre-requisites for the tarball compilation

• full kernel sources (see to distribution specific section)
• gcc (C compiler)
• autoconf (only necessary if you need to use gitcompile script)

Compilation commands for the tarball compilation

# ./configure
# make
# make install

Note: Example above will replace ALSA drivers for current kernel with drivers compiled from source.

Distribution specific

SUSE Linux/OpenSUSE

install appropriate kernel-source rpm package

Fedora 11/12

Make sure you have the right kernel-devel package installed; probably the kernel-PAE-devel package for the kernel you are running and will be running after the next reboot. Further kernel sources are not necessary.

Gentoo Linux

Run emerge media-sound/alsa-driver to get the latest stable version.
Note: this driver is now disencouraged, Gentoo recently switched to using the in-kernel driver as its first choice!

If you want the latest sources, use emerge --oneshot =media-sound/alsa-driver-9999 which will download the mercurial source tree, compile it and install it for you.

Follow the Gentoo Linux ALSA Guide to install ALSA.