i'm running debian 3.1 sarge and i haven't been able to have sound when using cedega, playing gltron, or anything else except kde's games, xmms, and noatun. i found out that it was the cause of my sound daemon. i saw artsd running and thought it might be the problem, so i killed it. then that made all of my sound stop working completely. so i started it back up again and the usual worked again. i came across something using google that said to make sure i had permissions to use esd. upon research it appears that it uses /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer. well, i didn't have /dev/dsp but i found it in /dev/.static/dev/dsp along with about 10 other dsps. i made a symlink to /dev and ran esd. it gives me an error saying i don't have the correct permissions so i run it as root and i get this little high pitched scale sound that i assume confirms it works. so i open up cedega and gltron and the sound works perfectly fine. so i tried changing permissions of dsp and mixer, but it ignores what i do. i checked to make sure i was in the audio group and i am. i'm using alsa, too on a custom 2.6.12.2 kernel. i've googled this numerous times and there seems to be other people who have the same problem but i couldn't find a working solution. anyone come across this before?

try chmod +666 /dev/dsp , chmod +666 /dev/mixer.
For a permanent solution , if you are using udev try setting the apropriate permisions in the permissions.rules ( MODE=0666 )

thanks for the reply. i did what you suggested...but it still doesn't work. maybe i configured something wrong?

if you say the /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer are there i suppose you have squencer support , oss mixer api and oss PCM api compiled in your kernel ...

i excluded the whole oss section when i was going through menuconfig. i didn't think i needed any of it since i've always used alsa. do i need to recompile my kernel with oss built in?

i could not get sound to work without the above options complied in my kernel. As a driver i am also using alsa.

ok, so when i recompile my kernel and include oss along with alsa will there be a way for me to tell the system that i don't want to use oss, but alsa instead?

you do not include oss.
the options i have told you about are in : Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.
You must not install OSS.