I'm having a few problems with sound. I'm running Suse 10 and I have an integrated SiS S1072 sound card, using snd-intel8x0 drivers. Everything used to work fine until one day I got a crash from the xine engine and since then, I've been having a few problems.

The first problem is that the sound config is not remembered when the system is rebooted so I have to run alsaconf or configure the card through YaST everytime I restart. I know the config is not getting loaded because I don't get any sounds (not even system sounds) and when I open up amaroK I get the following message:
"xine was unable to initialise any audio-drivers."

After running alsaconf (and restarting all open applications), amaroK plays fine but I still get no other sounds (for example, no sound from Gaim or Konsole). If I try and play anything from the command line (using play ...wav), I get the following message:
"sox: Can't open output file '/dev/dsp': Permission denied"
As root, I get the following:
"sox: Can't open output file '/dev/dsp': Device or resource busy"

Can anyone help with either problem?

/sbin/fuser -v /dev/dsp

And then kill the process. It should be amarok or artsd (not so sure).

/sbin/fuser -v /dev/dsp returned nothing therefore I could not kill the process.

When you run as root

you should get the process that keeps your sound device busy. This should be /dev/dsp, but could very well be /dev/dsp1 or other.

Alternatively, try killing any artsd or amarok (or any other sound programs) processes. Preferably as root.