OSS Proxy Daemon. Linux userland OSS sound device

April 2, 2013 • 5 minutes read

OSS Proxy Daemon is a Linux userland OSS sound device (e.g. /dev/dsp, /dev/mixer) that supports forwarding OSS sound streams to PulseAudio and ALSA.

This daemon helps to resolve a problems with sound in old OSS dependent applications. For example I had a problems with sound in Doom 3 and Quake 3 Arena.

The problem often appears on modern motherboards that have built-in audio cards. This audio cards do not have support for hardware mixing. That's why some old OSS dependent applications have problems with sound. How to resolve this problem? How to make sound available in a favorite old games, such as Doom 3 or Quake 3 Arena? The answer is OSS Proxy Daemon.

So, if you have an old OSS application and you want to make them run with sound in a modern hardware on linux you need to install osspd. OSS Proxy Daemon creates links to /dev/dsp, /dev/mixer devices and translates the sound via pulseaudio and alsa.

Install OSS Proxy Daemon from source

To install from source code type commands bellow in console

cd /tmp
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/osspd/ossp-1.3.2.tar.gz
tar -zxvf ossp-1.3.2.tar.gz
cd ossp-1.3.2/
make
sudo make install

If you have an error, that looks like as described below than you need to install libfuse-dev

No package 'fuse' found
gcc -Wall   -o osspd osspd.c  -L. -lossp 
osspd.c:14:27: fatal error: cuse_lowlevel.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.

So, to install libfuse-dev in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev

After installing libfuse-dev try to recompile osspd

cd ossp-1.3.2/
make
sudo make install

Start OSS Proxy Daemon

sudo /usr/local/sbin/osspd

To use OSS proxy you need to change access permissions to new virtual devices

sudo chmod o+rw /dev/dsp /dev/adsp /dev/cuse /dev/mixer 

To add OSS Proxy Daemon to startup just open with root permissions /etc/rc.local file in text editor and add here this records under exit 0

/usr/local/sbin/osspd
chmod o+rw /dev/dsp /dev/adsp /dev/cuse /dev/mixer 

Install OSS Proxy Daemon from Debian package

An alternative way to install OSS proxy is Debian package. You can download it from here

That's all. Now You can play Doom 3 and Quake 3 Arena with sound on Linux ;)