Open Sound System

Is anyone still using the Open Sound System provided by 4Front Technologies or are there past users who would like to use it
but are prevented from doing so due to problems with installation or incompatibilities with other software packages?

Yes! I use it on two different setups with some M-Audio Envy24 based PCI sound cards. On MX Linux I compile the drivers just for oss_envy24 and manually blacklist the ALSA drivers by creating a blacklist-file with the ALSA modules in On Ubuntu the latter step used to be much easier by doing sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-sound-base and selecting OSS. Haven't tried to install from the Debian based distro repos for almost a decade now since they're likely already broken, or in some cases not even available anymore. Only problem I've encountered with OSS incompatibilities is I have to use jack1 instead of jack2 and this breaks some packages unless I specifically install jack1 first. Some software packages depend on and work with jack2 only. I'm in the process of moving my Win7 DAW setup to LInux and it's going to be an interesting experiment to see how far OSS can go with using jack1.

Speaking of broken. Linux kernel 5.18 breaks OSS again. Found some fixes on the Arch forums. I'll make a post on the Linux section.

As you say the Debian repo. is not maintained and therefore broken.
The latest sources are available from SourceForge (see link below) but other than bug fixes nothing much has been added for some years,
leaving newer sound cards unsupported.

https://sourceforge.net/p/opensound/git/ci/master/tree/

My questions may seem stupid as I'm not familiar with Envy24 based sound cards.
By Jack 1 & Jack 2 are you referring to physical RCA analogue input/output
connectors mounted on the PCI card end plate or attached to a breakout cable?
If so what is to stop you physically swapping the connection or do the different jacks have different hardwired capabilities/limitations?
Do you use an audio server? If so are these virtual jacks as designated by a Jack server or similar?
Can the jacks be swapped over by changing mixer settings, symlinks (eg. /dev/dsp) or by changing settings in the envy24.conf file?

JACK Audio Connection Kit https://jackaudio.org/. There are two versions of JACK. Jack1 is the older version which supports OSS on linux and is on bugfix-only maintenance mode. Jack2 is the actively worked on and maintained version which supports OSS only on FreeBSD. Some software apparently have conflicting dependencies between the two. Will be interesting to try to setup a DAW with OSS. I've been using jack1 with Guitarix https://sourceforge.net/projects/guitarix/ and some early tests with DAWs like Reaper and Ardour seem positive.

I've been compiling OSS from the SourceForge sources. I recently tested the oss_hdaudio driver with the built in motherboard sound chip (Realtek ALC1200) which is from around 2008. Couldn't get that to work properly due to a bug in the driver. Apparently not even some of the older audio chips were that well supported. The OSS Envy24 driver on the other hand is as good as - or in some cases even better than - the Windows driver. I don't have any MIDI instruments so the lack of MIDI support isn't a huge loss, though it is a shame it was never implemented.