Description of problem: aoss is a wrapper script included in the ALSA software that makes it easier for apps to use the ALSA OSS compat library. Some apps, such as Firefox or, more precisely, the Flash plugin, use the OSS interface to play sounds. Because of that, there's sometimes a conflict between the browser and sound apps with regard to access to the sound card. E.g., if you start a media player (such as XMMS, etc.) and after that you start Firefox, there's no sound from those Firefox plugins (such as Flash) that have the ability to play sound. This issue disappears if Firefox is launched via aoss like this: $ aoss firefox & Please include aoss in future versions of the package, or at least in alsa-utils. It is the only way to work around this bug. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): alsa-lib-1.0.12-1.rc1 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start a media player such as XMMS and play a file 2. Start Firefox and browse to a Flash-enabled site Actual results: The Flash content has no sound. Expected results: Any and all Firefox plugins should play the sound regardless of whether other media players are active at the same time. Additional info: According to some, the issue only shows up on systems with a sound card that lacks hardware mixing support. See the discussion here, thread is called "XMMS and Firefox (or Flash?) not playing along nicely": http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/linux-audio-user/2006-August/thread.html#37626 The problem also shows up in older Fedora versions, such as FC5 and possibly also FC4 and older. Some distros such as Ubuntu not only include aoss, but provide a system-level variable called FIREFOX_DSP which, when set to "aoss" automatically uses aoss with Firefox (see discussion thread on the LAU mailing list linked above). This is a great idea.
Or just package aoss as a separate package named "alsa-oss" since that's where it really belongs.
Hm, And what about put it into extras?
Extras is fine too IMO.
Submit it a package for Fedora Extras then. We rather fix everything in Fedora Core to work with ALSA. Even flash plugin releases in the near future are going to use this.