Re: [tlug] Reinstalling ALSA from source? Anybody tried?

["Daniel A. Ramaley" <daniel.ramaley@example.com>]

On Thursday 24 January 2008 01:41, scott wrote:
> I'm thinking if I roll back alsa to a previous version maybe it will
>solve this problem. Of course, yum remove alsa will remove KDE and the
>whole kitchen sink as well, so instead what I am thinking of doing is:
>
>  rpm -e --nodeps alsa-lib-1.0.14-1.rc4.el5
>  rpm -e --nodeps alsa-utils-1.0.14-2.rc4.el5
>
>and then installing alsa from source.

Is there an earlier version of alsa available from your distribution? 
Rather than compiling from source, it might be easier to install an 
earlier RPM. You might even be able to just do a downgrade using the 
rpm command and not have to uninstall the current one before installing 
the one you want.


One problem to anticipate, however, is that an older RPM may not want to 
install because of dependency problems. If you can find the source RPM 
for an older version, it is relatively easy to compile it into a binary 
RPM; probably easier than trying to compile source from a tarball. If 
you've never compiled a source RPM, here's my instructions for doing it 
on one machine i maintain that requires some custom switches added to 
the ./configure line for PHP:

        # rpm -ivh php-4.3.9-3.8.src.rpm
        # cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
Edit php.spec as necessary, adding --with-mcrypt --with-mbstring=all.
        # rpmbuild -bb php.spec
The rm is optional, though it frees up a lot of space:
        # rm -rf /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/php-4.3.9
        # cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/x86_64
        # rpm -i php-4.3.9-3.15.x86_64.rpm \
                 php-devel-4.3.9-3.15.x86_64.rpm \
                 php-domxml-4.3.9-3.15.x86_64.rpm \
                 php-gd-4.3.9-3.15.x86_64.rpm \
                 php-imap-4.3.9-3.15.x86_64.rpm \
                 php-ldap-4.3.9-3.15.x86_64.rpm \
                 php-mbstring-4.3.9-3.15.x86_64.rpm \
                 php-pear-4.3.9-3.15.x86_64.rpm \
                 php-pgsql-4.3.9-3.15.x86_64.rpm

Of course, you're commands would vary since you're compiling alsa and 
not PHP; this is just a very rough guide to show how it is done and to 
give some ideas to feed to Google for more information. If you've never 
built an RPM before, the first time you run rpmbuild it will probably 
complain about missing dependencies (particularly the *-devel packages 
that Linux distributions are so fond of separating out). Take care of 
those dependencies and it should compile. You mentioned Centos; the 
above commands are used on a RedHat EL 4 machine; i'm not familiar with 
Centos specifically so it might be a bit different.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA