On running legacy audio driver (oss) on Fedora 20 (for running wavesurfer with alsa-oss)

wavesurfer  (http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/) is a popular tool for speech scientists to perform speech analysis. However, it uses the old OSS driver for sound output.

Although there is alsa-oss for compatibility, alsa-oss has been obsoleted since Fedora 20 due to no maintainer.

Therefore, in order to make wavesurfer work again, at least play sound, we need to compile alsa-oss by ourselves.

Firstly install the necessary libraries. Since wavesurfer is 32-bit software, we also install the 32-bit version of the libraries.

sudo yum install  alsa-lib-devel
sudo yum install  alsa-lib-devel.i686

sudo yum install alsa-plugin-pulseaudio.i686

sudo yum install alsa-plugin-pulseaudio

Download alsa-oss from
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Download

and compiles

sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

And runs wavesurfer like this
aoss wavesurfer