At present, Band In A Box will install without undue difficulty, and loads and runs, under both the current stable and recent beta releases; This was tested on a SuSE 9.1 and a Fedora Core 3 installation. The following setup is needed to get the midi mapper working, which is key to the app's usefulness:
Make sure you have these lines in your /etc/modprobe.conf file:
alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss
alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss
In the session where you first edit these in, you can stop and restart sound to get them operating (as root, /etc/init.d/alsasound stop, then /etc/init.d/alsasound start).
Now in a command line linux window, give the command
timidity -iA -A170 -B3,10 -Os -EFreverb=0&
This launches timidity in its server mode, which alsa will then see as a midi service.
Now when you install Band In A Box and run it the first time, it will say you have 5 midi driver options. You can accept the default and it will work. If it does not cause sound output, there are many possible reasons, but the most common by far is the sound being muted, so open a volume control and make sure the volume is up and the output is not muted before you do a lot of searching.
Also, note that if the menu bar does not work to bring down file menus and so on, the buttons on the gui can bring up most of the same options. If the graphics on the buttons are mangled, as they are for me, you may have to hover over the buttons to see the little prompt boxes pop up. On a SuSE installation I had this problem; on Fedora Core 3, I did not.
Band In A Box version 12 doesn't suffer this problem, but it lacks some nice features.
