Thanks for all of the replies. I have just returned home from work and will look at each item listed above to see what I can come up with.

One more question, If I do reinstall Alsa with Swaret, will I also need to reinstall all of the libs as well?

Yes you will.
Noah

yes, i also had this problem, did a similar thing to the thread starter. that is I let swaret upgrades everything and after reboot the sound was not there anymore, it says dev/snd or module couldn't be founded or loaded, something like.

then i did what one of the poster said, remove alsa package and grab the slackware cd1 then install the package from the cd, which I think is alsa ver 0.9.x.x, older than the latest one.

after the installation is done, did the 'alsaconf' and it found it and works like before, thanks to all who posted here.

where as the v1.02rc from the swaret update didn't find anything ( I tried the latest package from alsa homepage but couldn't even 'make' the file after './configure' thats why i turned to swaret) and before i didn't even know about alsa so i followed a guide from this http://basic-rip.co.uk/tenpin/linux_audigy_faq.html


point is why the older one finds it and the new one didn't??!!??
ps. i'm still at the very basic level of linux so go easy.


my spec is P4 1.6, audigy 2 plat.

By the way... An update. I got around to booting up the laptop and was able to reinstall the kernel from current as well as the alsa drivers and they work fine together now (after I ran alsaconf). Thanks for all of the help, Dropline was not the problem. Alsa/Kernel just weren't jiving for whatever reason.

My next task is to get the surround sound working on my desktop system and a new wireless card so I can completely get rid of Win2k.....

Sorry to revive and hijack this thread , but I had the same problem after a Swaret upgrade and I used njbrain's suggestion of uninstalling Alsa and reinstalling from the slackware cd. I did all that, and alsaconf found and configured my sound card fine, but now KDE gives me a new error message when it tries to initalize the sound server: device: default can't be opened for playback. (Permission denied.)

I guess that's better than /dev/dsp doesn't exist, but how can I fix it?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that "chmod 755 /dev/dsp" should do the job.
Noah

That didn't seem to do it, but it must be something like that because the sound server loads fine logged in as root... I'm at a complete loss when it comes to understanding the linux file permission system!

Same problem with alsa here. How did I fixed it?
Easy. I went to the alsa-project web page, researched my sound card and looked up installation instructions and compiled from source. Easy as 1, 2, 3. Next time you upgrade with swaret, do not let it upgrade alsa if you don't want this to happen againg.

-- Figa

hey mc_03, guess what.. you dont have permission to use that file. So what you do is this:
root@/dev/snd/# chown :users dsp
root@/dev/snd/# chmod g+rx dsp

or something like that. And please do us all a favor and read a tutorial on linux permisions. tldp.org is a great resource.

chmod a+rwx /dev/dsp0 /dev/mixer0 /dev/midi0, should do the job.
Noah

Somewhere I read that the best way is :

usermod -G sys <user> as all devs are usable by sys group