I've been trying to install the drivers for my Toneport converter. http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-ins...ux1-or-gx.html

One of the instructions is

Only use the OSS drivers for native OSsupport and to prevent feedback while using Jack Keep the “Monitor” channel muted.

I looked into Sound Settings and don't see any of the options available that allow me to switch to "OSS drivers" or to keep the "monitor" channel muted.

OSS driver are the old drivers used by Linux about 10 years ago. Linux uses ALSA now, is your card that old? You can enable OSS emulation in alsa, usually it works.

"Channel" here means the mixer channel, you can use kmix to show all channels from your card (once the driver is installed) and mute the channel called "Monitor".

How do I get into ALSA to enable the OSS emulation?

lamarque wrote:OSS driver are the old drivers used by Linux about 10 years ago. Linux uses ALSA now, is your card that old? You can enable OSS emulation in alsa, usually it works.

Not necessarily. OSS4 is the modern spin of the OSS subsystem, and it's an option on many distros.

Instructions to enable OSS4 will vary between distributions. It will likely require blacklisting ALSA modules so that they do not attempt to access sound hardware and unblacklisting the OSS4 ones, if they are available.

You may be required to self-compile your own Kernel depending on the distribution.

This definitely worked before and I'm pretty sure i've been using ALSA this entire time. I opened KMIX to mute the "monitor" channel but couldn't find any channeled named monitor. or channels to mute in general. is it still in kmix?

KMix displays the channels that ALSA is aware of. The monitor channel is only available if ALSA drivers make them.