For so long, since I moved to Archlinux I have a belief that Alsa\'s OSS emulation is not working, at least on my system. I spent so much time searching on google and asking on irc until giving up with that belief. It\'s totally my mistake. I broke the #1 rules - read the doc ! Thanks to a friend asking how to configure ALSA for his soundcard which get me back to the docs. I\'m not really sure what made me think that I\'ve done all the necessary step. Two mistakes actually - I did not install alsa-oss package and I forgot to load snd_pcm_oss module that will provide OSS emulation for alsa. Correct this and it takes not more than 5 minutes to get everything to work.
# pacman -S alsa-oss
# modprobe snd_pcm_oss
Add this entry to /etc/devfsd.conf
REGISTER sound/.* PERMISSIONS root.sound 660
REGISTER snd/.* PERMISSIONS root.sound 660
Create sound group and add user to that group, restart devFS. Although I can simply chmod 777 for the sound devices, I thought this is better.
# groupadd sound
# gpasswd -a kamal sound
# killall -HUP devfsd
Now I can use all player that still need OSS such as moc, mp3blaster and xmms without the Alsa output plugin.
