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... So, now you know how to solve the problem if you ever run into it...