I just completed my slackware 9.1 install (first time slackware user). and I updated the system using swaret --update and swaret --upgrade. But now there are a few problems with the system that hadn't occured before (and some that I never got around to fixing). Can anyone shed some light on the situation?

1. The biggest issue at the moment is sound, it worked fine before aside from flash animation on websites where I needed to use 'chmod a+rw /dev/dsp' every time I booted up before it would work (can anyone tell me what config file I need to edit to execute some commands automatically when I log in by the way?) Now after doing my update with swaret (which I know installed some Alsa libs along with other system files, I'm not sure if thats what did it) I get an error as I log into KDE. A message box tagged 'Informational - artsmessage' pops up and gives me the following error.
Sound server informational message:
Error while initializing the sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (No such device)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device.
Does anyone know what I can do about that to get my sound back?

2. I am on a laptop with a touchpad as my default input device, but I have a USB mouse that I like to use when I am at a desk. I still have my XF86Config-4 file from my last distro (Mandrake) because I had some problems getting the two input devices to work at the same time with that too. Should I just copy the device entry from that file and change the serverlayout to match?

3. Lastly, I cannot access any of my mounted drives from normal user mode, (ie. windows partition, portable USB hard drive, USB diskonkey).
My original fstab entry for my windows directory was
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat defaults 1 0
Then I changed it to
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat auto,users,rw 0 0
then to
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat auto,owner,rw 0 0
None of those worked, I still get access denied errors when trying to enter from Konqueror.
I don't have fstab entries for my removable media, but I mount them with the command
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/removable
I get the same type of error in this case too. Does anyone have any experience with this problem? thanks

1. Try:

Also, open Control Center->Sound and Multimedia->Sound System->Hardware

make sure Advanced Linux Sound Architecture is selected under Audio Device

and finally, from a command line run: alsamixer

unmute all channels that you will use, set volume levels then press ESC to exit

then run: alsactl store

to save settings.

2. I've sucessfully copied the entire file between distributions. Your mileage may vary.

3. Can you access them as root? If so, then check the permissions in the mount points themselves. ls -l /mnt should show something like:

drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 48 Mar 15 2002 windows/

1. When you ran swaret --upgrade it probably didn't update the kernel as well. Go download all the necessary kernel stuff and upgradepkg 'em. Then, after a reboot, run alsaconf and see if your soundcard is detected.
2. That should work. Anyone out there correct me if I'm wrong, please.
3. You might need to add umask=000 to the options on the windows drive in your fstab; this should also work with the removeable drives. But, first, did you create the right directories in /mnt?