Hi. I recently wrote ALSA PCM and seq support for BRLTTY[1]. However, the fact that libasound.so.2 lives in /usr/lib does present a little problem for us. BRLTTY needs to be run as early as possible during startup, most likely before /usr is even mounted. Linking against -lasound the traditional way therefore is quite a bug, since the executable now doesn't start anymore if /usr is missing. We've solved this now by dlopen() and dlsym()'ing all the symbols we actually need, and call our private function pointers instead of the real library symbols. However, this solution is kind of icky. At the same time, we wrote support for QNX, which seems to have a early fork of ALSA as the QNX Sound Architecture (also called libasound). QNX apparently already puts its libasound.so in /lib, most probably because of this problem. I'd like to ask the community what you think about moving libasound from /usr/lib/ to /lib/? With OSS, that wasn't a problem at all, since the ioctl calls were simple enough that there is/was no need for a wrapper lib. But since ALSA kind of relies on that, wouldn't it make more sense to have the lib in /lib so that early boot programs can output sound too? -- CYa, Mario