The following sound cards are supported by the Linux kernel:
Other sound cards that are claimed to be compatible with one of the supported sound cards may work if they are hardware (i.e. register level) compatible.
The Sound Galaxy NX Pro is supported as a SoundBlaster compatible,
provided that you add #define __SGNXPRO__
to the sound driver
local.h
file.
The Linux kernel supports the SCSI port provided on some sound cards
(e.g. ProAudioSpectrum 16). There is also support for CD-ROM drives
attached to the Soundblaster Pro and SoundBlaster 16 CD-ROM port (see
the file /usr/src/linux/drivers/block/README.sbpcd
).
A kernel patch to support joystick ports, including those provided on some sound cards, is also available.
An alternate sound driver is available that requires no additional sound hardware; it uses the internal PC speaker. It is mostly software compatible with the sound card driver, but, as might be expected, provides much lower quality output and has much more CPU overhead. The results seem to vary, being dependent on the characteristics of the individual loudspeaker. For more information, see the documentation provided with the release.
The current version is 0.6, and can be found at site
sunsite.unc.edu
in the file
pub/Linux/kernel/misc-patches/pcsndrv-0.6.tar.z
.
Another option is to build a digital to analog converter using a parallel printer port. This provides better sound quality but still has a lot of CPU overhead. The PC sound driver package mentioned above supports this, and includes instructions for building the necessary hardware.
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