The first question which people tend to ask about ALSA is why they should use it over the sound drivers included in the kernel - there are several reasons. Firstly, the ALSA drivers support more sound cards than those in the kernel. Secondly, the OSS emulation is in some cases faster and better than the original OSS driver itself. And finally, there are some programs which can use ALSA's enhanced features to better drive the soundcard. ALSA is also likely to be the future of Linux Sound (hence the name Advanced Linux Sound Architecture), and the ALSA drivers will probably be included into the main linux kernel at some point during the 2.5 development series, leading eventually to ALSA being the "standard" sound drivers into the future 2.6 stable kernel. You currently need to decide whether to use the 0.5.x series or the 0.9-beta series. At the moment, if you use the 0.9.x drivers, some older software will fail to compile with ALSA support. This is because there is a new API in the 0.9.x series which isn't yet widely supported. In these cases it is usually possible just to use the OSS driver emulation which ALSA supplies (which can be superior to the OSS drivers themselves). We don't recommend one ALSA series over the other as there are advantages to both versions, however you should probably use the latest point release of whichever series you decide to use. &alsa-intro; &alsa-desc; &alsa-inst; &alsa-config; &alsa-cards;