Kernel 2.6 sound issues
 

Now this is funny: I have as of a couple hours ago compiled the official 2.6 kernel and ran into problems concerning the sound capabilities. I (as you may have guessed) chose ALSA over OSS, and in my prior setup (2.4.23) I was using ALSA as my sound drivers. I have a SoundBlaster Live! card and now I'm struggling to get it working again. Here's the thing:

Nothing related to OSS will work (for obvious reasons, did not work either in my previous setup anyways) so I can't use redhat-config-soundcard, I constantly get the error that /dev/mixer could not be opened. Now the funny stuff: after manually loading the modules alsamixer DOES work (and as every ALSA upgrade, the channels are muted, so I used it to unmute them), also aplay DOES work, so this is obviously a problem with the way apps are accessing the device. Maybe some are looking at /dev/mixer instead of /dev/dsp? In any case I re-ran the snddevices script from the offical ALSA sources to no avail, still can't access my /dev/mixer /dev/dsp devices. Funny enough aplay -l reports a total of 32 possible devices (due to the Live! card) and an extra 8 devices...

Now it's a known fact that in order to get ALSA woking properly on the system you should do some changes to your modules.conf file. As far as I know the 2.6 kernel searches for kernel module parameters at modprobe.conf instead of modules.conf, so I was thinking on just copying over the module settings from modules.conf to modproe.conf.

Anyone else having this problem?

Guess what? My little experiment did work... :D So, now you know how to solve the problem if you ever run into it...