This problem is very strange. I did a clean install from scratch on my Linux box because of some other probs I was having. Installed MDK 10 Official. Edited the XFConfig files without problem, and 3D acceleration works. But for some weird reason this seems to screw up the sound. As soon as I start a KDE or Gnome session, I get this error message:

Error while initializing the sound driver:

device /dev/dsp can't be opened (Permission denied)

The sound server will continue, using the null output device.


Seems like whatever modifications Nvidia is doing for video purposes are also changing something else, but I'm really not sure what. Any ideas?

One thing to check would be the permissions on /dev/dsp. If may be that your regular user account doesn't have permission on it, in which case you could use the chmod command to rectify it. -- J.W.

That pointed me in the right direction, thanks. This may be one of the dumber ways to go about it, but I just went to root, and typed "chmod a+rwx /dev/dsp". I really didn't know which permissions I needed to change here, so I just changed them all. I guess probably the main one I needed to change was the execute permission...but none of this really matters, since this box is just used by me anyways. As long as I can get sound on my user account (especially since Mandrake in particular is very persnickety about allowing root sessions to run GUI sessions). If there's a more elegant or less clumsy way to do what I did, let me know at some point. Thanks again.

SteelWheel -- I'm glad that helped. The command you ran will perfectly work, as you reported, and there is also the equivalent numerical version: chmod 777 /dev/dsp which would have the same effect. From my point of view, the key thing when dealing with any sort of technical problem is "Does the proposed solution work?" If the answer is Yes, that's all that really matters. -- J.W.