My sound was working fine last night, in XMMS, video players, etc. I booted up this morning, and when KDE was started it gave me this error:

Error while initializing the sound drive: device /dev/dsp can't be opened (No such device)
The sound server will continue, using the null ouptut device.

I checked /dev/dsp, it is there, a symbolic link to /dev/dsp0. The permissions are OK; infact, I am the owner of it. (owner mary group root. But I changed it to group "users" and it still didn't seem to work...)

I've tried several different sound systems in KDE's control centre (OSS, ALSA, ESD, arts...) and none of them are working.

I rebooted again, and noticed that alsa and the OSS compatibility layer (which seem to be started using the script rc.alsa in /etc/rc.d) do not appear to be started? Yesterday they were started, and alsa even complained about how the sound might be muted, etc.

I was using alsa/arts w/KDE 3.1.4, but I switched to KDE Beta2 and then Alsa/arts sound would not work. So I changed to OSS (as far as I know, anyway...)

I tried running the script rc.alsa in /etc/rc.d, and it didn't give errors or anything, but my sound still didn't work! How do I make that start at boot? Why did it stop starting at boot? Or did it? Is that even the problem?

I'm still such a newbie, probably shouldn't be using Slack.

Is this file still an executable?? ls -la /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa ----do a chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa (if nessessary)

also, have you checked the volume levels on kmix and/or aumix(if installed)
sometimes kmix will re-set to the default level, which is extremely low....
change the slider levels and set as new default.