Problem with sound -- Gnome hangs on startup
 

Hmmm... I installed Slack 9.1 on a Dell Latitude (C640), and spiced up the system with Dropline Gnome. All was well with 2.4.22 kernel, but then I compiled 2.6.4 (with ALSA) and Gnome hangs at startup when logging in as user. Logging in as root is ok, and the sound works well.

The error I get is /dev/dsp: Permission denied, and I have tried the various methods from the forum, added audio-group and myself into it, and chmod'd /dev/dsp to 666. Somewhere it was also mentioned that changing /etc/security/console.perms to have a line saying
<console> 0666 <sound> 0666 root.audio
might help, but it didn't. The problem seems to be that the permissions on all the files in /dev/sound are reset to crw------- at reboot.

So, what should I do?

BTW, thanks for the Great forum!

Sia

Trying to get it work... and got worse in the meantime...

I was happy to find this thread and followed the instructions in it (I have a intel8x0 compatible chip as well).

So, I compiled a new kernel without ALSA built in, and after step one, when I tried to change the permissions, I got an error that these devices do not exist. To recreate them, I ran the MAKEDEV.snd srcipt, and got further. All went without a hitch, and I had sound both as root and user. Hooray!!!

BUT... then when I rebooted, I could not again start Gnome (not even as root), because the newly created device /dev/dsp and others had disappeared. WHY???

Help greatly appreciated!

S

Aha...!! Think I got it...

It was something completely else... When I compiled the new kernel, there devfs was enabled... and that probably caused the changing permissions...? Don't really know for sure what happened, though, nor what the devfs does... It says in the notes that devfs is obsolete.

In the end, I compiled ALSA and the modules into the kernel, and all is working well :D

Happy happy!