I can’t understand why the OSS audio driver with the largest list of audio cards and potential users was omitted in the alpha release? Especially since Haiku or at least BeOS had a huge audio niche … more so then any other niche.
I think it has been left out due to the fact it creates a interrupt storm on systems with both OSS and HDA drivers.
From memory, there is a problem with OSS when it tries to initialise an audio device when the system already has a native Haiku driver initialised. The OSS would lock the system up in this scenario. Francois (the driver author) needed a few more days to better integrate the OSS driver with Haiku, and he just didn’t have the time to do it before the Alpha1 deadline. Rest assured that by the next alpha/beta, this situation will be resolved and OSS will be part of the system.
You can manually install OSS from the Haiku optional packages website. Since you obviously dont have a Haiku native audio driver, you wont run into the problem of a conflict arising. For those users who have a working native driver and wish to try OSS, they need to remove the native driver first (until OSS is updated to coexist with native drivers).