rc.sysinit's very basic logic for checking whether sound modules are configured results in a [FAILED] message to appear upon boot if the line: alias sound off OR alias midi off appears in conf.modules. This creates problems for us hedonists who use 4Front's OSS. OSS doesn't like to use modprobe and therefore requires that the aliases be disabled. When modprobe encounters alias * off it returns a non-zero result that the action subroutine interprets as a failure. It would be nice not to have big, red [FAILED] messages on my screen at every boot. Thanks for any consideration.
I wote that the sound initialization is completely removed from rc.sysinit. This is much better done on demand by kmod, or in another init script. I have removed this from my rc.sysinit script, and uninstalled the sound init script from all runlevels, and instead use the following settings in /etc/conf.modules (for SB16) alias sound-slot-0 sb alias synth0 opl3 options sound dmabuf=1 options opl3 io=0x388 options sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330 pre-remove sb /etc/rc.d/init.d/sound stop >/dev/console 2>&1 post-install sb /etc/rc.d/init.d/sound start >/dev/console 2>&1 By the way, why doesn't OSS like modprobe? It is after all the standard method for loading modules..
The issue with OSS not liking kmod is strange. It needs to load a wrapper modules that is kernel-version specific called sndshield. Then other modules have to loaded under that. Probably a huge list of dependencies in modules.dep would do it, but I'm not sure that depmod will generate those dependencies. I'll look into that.
Will be fixed in initscripts-4.84-1, in that it won't try to load an 'off' alias. Oddly enough, modutils-2.3.9 returns 0 for 'modprobe off'.