gom: Ten years gone

I joined the Linux crusade well after the advent of ALSA audio, so the old, old days of OSS are mostly lost on me. I think I experimented with OSS with a couple of very old laptops about three or four years ago, but never saw any real advantage to using the old audio subsystem over the new.

That’s vaguely ironic, since now I don’t see any advantage to using JACK or pulse audio over ALSA. 😕

The source files for gom show updates as recent as 2009 though, so it may be that you can still milk the OSS framework and have a viable audio mixer at the terminal.

That’s probably not a fair screenshot of gom, since I’ve really only installed the OSS framework in Arch, then force-built gom and gotten into the interface. It’s not really working the audio on this system.

But it should give you a general idea of what gom does, and how it handles itself. No color, nothing flashy, none of the wild craziness of alsamixer (that was a joke 🙄 ). Just channels and data, and the ability to control the audio at hand.

gom is in both AUR and Debian, but I only built the Arch rendition. Like I mentioned, I needed to build oss out of AUR, which was not a huge challenge. I had alsa-oss installed as well, but I don’t think that was necessary.

Using gom reminded me of both rexima and aumix, in that they all seem to take a back seat to alsamixer. It may be that gom had a finer hour ten years ago, but I’d be surprised if there were still OSS fans out there, and if they would put gom to use. 😦