I did a search on this and found some information, but I have another question. I just installed Slackware8.1 the other day, but I'm having some trouble with my sound card. When I startx I get the following error prompt:

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

I'm not sure what this means, am I supposed to create the file? I issued the lspci command and got the following information for my sound card:

Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 09)

So I looked in /lib/modules/2.5.48/kernel and I found the es1371.o module sitting there. So I tried modprobe es1371.o and I got the following error:

modprobe: Can't open dependencies file /lib/modules/2.5.48/modules.dep (No such file or directory)

Am I missing something here perhaps the modules.dep file? When I was getting ready to compile the kernel and did a make dep - it returned pretty quickly. Does anyone know what's going on here? Thanks for your help.

Is there an actual /dev/dsp ?? What is the output of this: ls -al /dev/dsp* ??

And are you getting this error as a regular user or as root ?? What's the permissions of the /dev/dsp and or /dev/mixer if they exist ??

I'm getting this error as root - I've been in root setting things up.
There is a /dev/dsp and a /dev/dsp1 as well as a /dev/mixer and a /dev/mixer1 - all of the files are 0 bytes though. Here's the results of ls -al /dev/dsp*:

crw-rw---- 1 root sys 14, 3 Jul 18 1994 /dev/dsp
crw-rw---- 1 root sys 14, 19 Jul 18 1994 /dev/dsp1

and here's the results of ls -al /dev/mixer*:

crw-rw---- 1 root sys 14, 0 Jul 18 1994 /dev/mixer
crw-rw--- 1 root sys 14, 16 Jul 18 1994 /dev/mixer1

I hope that helps - I have no idea. Would compiling a new kernel and including my soundcard driver alleviate this problem?