[PlanetCCRMA] ALSA Hell - please help!

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

> [long story munched]
> I'm currently having a very frustrating situation trying to get ALSA to work
> on my fedora box and could really use any help anyone could give me. 

The first step would be to really get rid of all alsa installs that you
have in your machine. You probably have more than one given the long and
frustrating story you went through. 

1) rpms. Uninstall all alsa packages. Do something like:
   rpm -q -a | egrep ^alsa-
that should give you a list of all packages (alsa-driver, alsa-lib and
so on). If the alsa packages you installed are only from Planet CCRMA
you should be fine erasing what that command gives you. You will
probably get complaints from rpm saying you cannot erase the packages
because of dependencies. You can, temporarily, erase them with --nodeps
(ie: "rpm -e --nodeps alsa-driver-WHATEVER" and so on). 

2) getting rid of manual installs. That is more difficult. You may have
alsa installed in more than one place depending on what you did exactly
(I would check /usr/local and /usr). For a start I would do this:

  ls -l /usr/lib/libasound*
  ls -l /usr/local/lib/libasound*

Note the dates on the files. You can try using find to search for all
files in your hard disk that were installed in that date and around that
time. If your installs were back to back you should be able to get all
the versions. Something like:

  ls -l /usr/lib/libasound.so.2.0.0
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       677460 Dec  8 15:1
/usr/lib/libasound.so.2.0.0

So now do a:
  find / -xdev -ls | grep "Dec  8 15:"
That should list all files that were installed at or near the time of
the libasound install. Do that with /usr/local/lib if you find anything
there. You could use "aplay" for searching for the alsa-utils install.
Check the /lib/modules/x.x.x for the kernels under which you installed
alsa... something like "find /lib/modules -name snd-\*" should list all
the installed modules that have the snd- prefix. 

Once you are clean you could try installing the low latency kernel and
alsa drivers again from RPM (or doing a manual install if that is what
you prefer). 

There is a 2.4.23 and 1.0.0rc2 set of packages in the Planet Edge
repository. I just finished rebuilding for 7.3/8.0 so I think a full
"official" release will happen later today for all supported distro
versions. 

-- Fernando