Ok, I've got Mandrake 9.1 working mostly great on my IBM Thinkpad T40 with kernel 2.4.22-rc1-ac1 + supermount. The sound card however is being very strange. I can always use the arts driver to achieve sound, but I really dislike this option because of the reaction time lag with it, and it also seems to skip from time to time. The OSS driver seems to fade in and out of proper operation at complete random. I have yet to find anything to trigger it stopping working, or starting working again.

For example, I was just reading a post here and listening to some music through xmms using OSS, when it goes to the next track and then for no reason whatsoever it complains that it can't access /dev/dsp anymore.

I couldn't use OSS last night, but then sometime during the night, it started working again, and in the morning xmms played fine with OSS until the above incident.

I realize that I haven't given a whole lot of info on the problem, but it's mostly because I have no idea where the source of the problem could be. I've been trying to pin down this issue for quite awhile now, with no clues at all as of yet.

Anyone had similar problems, and if so, how did you fix them?

it could be that some thing is taking hold of the sound card while xmms isn't looking. look for what processes are running if anything looks sound related kill it then try again. if that doesn't work try running xmms as root. hope this helps.

It doesn't look like I have anything that is even remotely sound related besides artsd, which I already tried killing when I couldn't get any sound from OSS. I will try running xmms as root next time OSS dies on me to see if that helps however.