Oh no... I just messed up my sound on my Debian...
 

Hello all,

I just, stupidly messed up my sound on my Debian machine. It was working all so fine until I started having problems playing sound in Realplayer10. So, now don't ask me why because I guess I shouldn't have started to mess with something that wasn't broken, but I apt-get installed alsa, thinking that maybe it would fix my sound problem with Realplayer. Well, it didn't.

Now I know that alsa redirects where the computer points to for the sound device, so when I rebooted my computer, naturally it could no longer find my sound driver. So, I am like "ahh ok, alsa is the culprite, let's just do a apt-get remove alsa." So I did. I reboot, and NO! My sound is still not working!! I get the message /dev/dsp can't be opened bc it doesn't exist. *sigh*

So, I was wondering if anyone knows how to undo what I did, or how I can get alsa to work nicely, or if I even need it. How can I point it in the right direction, and does anyone know where it pointed to before looking in /dev/dsp? *sigh* Thanks so much for your help everyone!

what else happened before the sound problem?

Nothing - it was working fine EXCEPT for the realplayer10. Like, if I wanted to watch something at Newgrounds it would not play sound, so I figured it was some sound card issue. But, that was the only problem. It happened after I apt-get installed alsa. Now it is looking in the wrong place I fear. Actually, I don't know. But other than this mess now, nothing was wrong. Now when I boot up I get this artsmessage error while initializing the sound driver.

Maybe if I can change the path where it looks for sound drivers it will work? Can I force the alsa to work for me? *sigh* I don't know how to change these paths though. Please help lil; ol' sould-less me. :(

I might be taking a stab in the dark, but maybe the wrong process got control over the sound device, and I don't know how you deleted a device, but you might have messed it up bad enough for a reinstall (you have your home directory on another partition right? so you don't lose any files)

Have you tried "alsaconf" from the command line? That should re-setup your soundcard.

Thanks for your help everyone, but I just re-installed. I did try alsaconf but it did not even recodnise the command so....... I just didn't feel like dealing with that headache. I was able to save my /home files anyway since they were on another partition so whew! heh. Thanks though! I'm here listening now to some music and happy that my device has been found!! lol Thanks again!

Eh..alsaconf didn't work because you didn't have alsa-utils installed. Oh well :)