Linux 2.4 Sound Changes 2000-September-25 Christoph Hellwig, === isapnp support The Linux 2.4 Kernel does have reliable in-kernel isapnp support. Some drivers (sb.o, ad1816.o awe_wave.o) do now support automatically detecting and configuring isapnp devices. === soundcard resources on kernel commandline Before Linux 2.4 you had to specify the resources for sounddrivers statically linked into the kernel at compile time (in make config/menuconfig/xconfig). In Linux 2.4 the ressources are now specified at the boot-time kernel commandline (e.g. the lilo 'append=' line or everything that's after the kernel name in grub). Read the Configure.help entry for your card for the parameters. === softoss is gone In Linux 2.4 the softoss in-kernel software synthesizer is no more aviable. Use a user space software synthesizer like timidity instead. === /dev/sndstat and /proc/sound are gone In older Linux versions those files exported some information about the OSS/Free configuration to userspace. In Linux 2.3 they were removed because they did not support the growing number of pci soundcards and there were some general problems with this interface.