SiS on board sound stops working when upgrading alsa? + kernel question?

Sound question
Hey, I installed slackware 9.1 last night (i know I'm a few versions behind but I have to make do seeing as I'm on 56k) anyway, when I first logged in I ran

alsaconf 
alsactl store

and it detected my sound card and everything was hunkey dorey, well later last night I thought it was probably a good idea to upgrade all my packages so I downloaded and installed swaret and everything upgraded fine, or so I thought, if I press backspace on a terminal I get a beep from the pc speakers, which wasn't there before, this isnt the problem, I opened up xmms and started trying to play a song, I got some error in the terminal

** WARNING **: oss_open(): Failed to open audio device (/dev/dsp): No such device

so I thought that was weird and then decided to re run alsaconf seeing as how every package had been updated with swaret and it tells me it cant find my sound card, which was previously working, is there any way to fix this? or do i need to recompile my kernel? (i'm terrified of this, ive tried previously without much luck)

kernel question
I'm not very hard ware inclined and I was wandering is there any way to use exactly the same elements of the current kernel which until I upgraded packages was working fine, for example the same modules as the ones running? I hope that makes sense


thanks in advance,

giz

Recompile alsa-drivers and all should be well. Or install the precompiled binary package for your corresponding kernel version.

Cheers, Leon.

thanks alot man

in your boot folder, you will have a file called "config-ide-2.4.22" ( note that the name might be different depending on what you are using, IIRC slack 9.1 came with 2.4.22). this is your kernel config and can be re-used to recompile the kernel with the same configuation. once you have your kernel source, copy that file into the kernel source directory and rename it ".config".

NOTE:

if you are recompiling 2.4.22 again, and want to save your old kernel and modules just in case, you need to edit the Makefile in the kernel source directory ( the Makefile in the top source directory) and add something to the EXTRAVERSION= line, for example:

ERSION = 2
PATCHLEVEL = 4
SUBLEVEL = 26
EXTRAVERSION = -custom

this will create a kernel named 2.4.26-custom and it will not overwrite your current kernel.

for your sound problem, what is your chipset? I have a sis7012 and I pretty much use oss for everything instead of alsa ( except for flashplayer, which oss for some reason refuses to work). I can listen to music and everything with alsa, but games will not work with alsa. also, do you have the snd-pcm-oss modules loaded when you are trying to use xmms?