Hi Folks, Sorry if you experience cross-posting, but I seem to be on a needle-in-a-haystack hunt here.
I'm running Red Hat 9 (2003 vintage), 2.4 kernel, on a Compaq Armada 1750 laptop whose sound card is "ESS 1869 Audioline" (though it works OK with 1868 or 11688 drivers).
I want to use Skype. Owing to the age of the system, I'm limited to earlier versions of Skype (library compatibility), and these use OSS sound rather than ALSA.
Skype works up to successful calling (the "bell" rings at either end, but when the call is accepted all you can hear at the calling end is a repeated clicking (about once/sec) and at the receiving end in a similar rhythm a noise more like someone hitting wood with a hammer in the distance.
At the same time, at the calling end, repeated messages come up:
GETOSPACE: Device or resource busy GETOSPACE: Device or resource busy GETOSPACE: Device or resource busy ...
Extensive web-searching has thrown up various facts. a) The ESS 1869 is bad news Skype-wise anyway; b) The above situation is a well-known issue with the earlier versions of Skype (the most recent versions have ALSA support, but demand more recent libs than I have). c) Some people have reported sucess with deceitful work-rounds, including:
-- skype_dsp_hijacker which intercepts Skype's calls to the sound devices and keeps things in order.
However, this has not worked for me. Either I get the same as the above, or "Problem with sound device" in Skype plus error message "/dev/dsp-1: No such device" to the comsoles
-- alsa-oss which installs a library and uses a wrapper to convert Skype's OSS format into Alsa format.
I haven't tried alsa-oss because, seach as I may, I cannot find a download for it (in any version). Even the link on the Alsa Project
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page
draws a blank: it cannot change into the directory for alsa-oss!
All other links I've found on the Web are dead.
I'd be most gratefull is anyone who's travelled along this road and has successfully arrived could help me out!
The ideal would be a compilable source package.
And if anyone has found a working alternative solution to the abve probelm, I'd be most interested to hear about this too.
With thanks, and best wishes, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Aug-07 Time: 22:31:17 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------