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Monday, June 7, 2010

OSS Hack

The latest OSS (Open Sound System) version 4.2 from 4front technologies is a rock solid sound solution of *Nix-es and worked beautifully on my Mint* OS. (The * Actually means a heavily customized Mint very far from the real Mint.) Well actually it made my new Creative X-Fi 6 channel + Midi Enabled sound card produce Music! ALSA will not work (as of Now Jun, 2010) and Creative officially does not support Linux (or any other *NIX). A series of e-mails I wrote made me confirm I cannot exchange my sound card with another model from them... and a refund was out of question!

Okay, so Apparently the latest download drivers will expire on May 2010, 6 days ago that is. But I am enjoying music from my OSS right now! How is that possible!

Mystery ended, mere mortals... here's how it can be reversed:

So, the OSS system starts-up via
soundon.



This script loads the kernel module and reports errors.

My first try was to hack my date program and write a shell script that would display a different date when invoked by this script (i.e. the parent process should be named soundon).

This try failed and I straced the call to a time function call later on. I had mis-interpreted a date invocation as being used by the module... pretty stupid!

So, half an hour had gone past but no results? So here came my next try.

At the beginning of
/usr/bin/soundon
shell script I added these lines:

XXX=`date`
date --set="Sat May 1 00:00:00 IST 2010" >> /dev/null

[Note that since I am in Indian Standard Time, I have added IST, you must set it to your timezone (or GMT).]

and before each and every exit statement (just to be sure!)
add this:

date --set="$XXX" >> /dev/null

Now do a soundoff and soundon... and wolla! OSS is working

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