Did you have no success at installing the nVidia drivers, or no success in resolving the situation with the drivers installed?

Passing the pci=biosirq option to the bootloader as the error message suggested also did not change anything?

On a slightly different angle, when you say you installed the drivers, I assume you mean you are talking about the .tar.gz files available from the nvidia site Correct? If so, then perhaps the issue is with /dev/dsp What are the results of running a basic ls -l on /dev/dsp? If your regular user account lacks permissions on it, then it may turn out that you just need to chmod /dev/dsp to permit regular user access. As a side note, if I remember correctly the audio module is called nvaudio, and I would confirm it appears in the output of lsmod.

To be honest I can't say if either of these things will solve the problem, but they are things that I would check. Good luck with it either way -- J.W.

Yes, I installed the drivers from the nvidia site. It looks like the system is still trying to load the Intel 8x0 drivers. lsmod does not show nvaudio being loaded. I also made sure that the permissions were set correctly on /dev/dsp which is a symbolic link. I allowed access to the audio group, which both root and my userid are members of. It still won't load. Here is the output of lsmod:

snd-seq 33424 0 (autoclean)
snd-seq-device 3888 0 (autoclean) [snd-seq]
snd-pcm-oss 37736 0 (autoclean) (unused)
snd-mixer-oss 12504 0 (autoclean) [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-pcm 56072 0 (autoclean) [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-timer 13604 0 (autoclean) [snd-seq snd-pcm]
snd-page-alloc 6328 0 (autoclean) [snd-pcm]
snd 30852 0 (autoclean) [snd-seq snd-seq-device snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm snd-timer]
soundcore 3396 0 (autoclean) [snd]
usbcore 59308 1
pcmcia_core 39972 0
ntfs 51424 1 (autoclean)
ide-scsi 9328 0
forcedeth 9164 1
agpgart 43940 0 (unused)

Oh....here is the ls -l on /dev/dsp

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2004-07-04 05:56 /dev/dsp -> dsp0

adding the pci=biosirq parameter didn't have any effect, either.

this may be a dumb question, but in one of the early posts, motub suggested you run alsaconf...did you ever do this? the reason i ask is that i did a fresh install of slack 10 on a box with an nforce2 ultra mobo and the sound worked perfectly right away. i didn't have to install any nvidia drivers or anything. after i recompiled my kernel, i had to uninstall and reinstall the alsa-driver package, but that was the only issue i had. i am quite surprised it is being this difficult for you.

Yes, I ran alsaconf, and it detects the snd-intel8x0 card, but it thinks the card may be muted. If I try to run alsamixer, I get this:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

I've opened up /dev/dsp to full rights for all users, and I'm still getting the same errors. My machine is an e-machines box, so I'm not sure if the motherboards they have present issues.

If I remember right my sound did not work whenever I installed Slackware 10. When I went to recompile my kernel, the only sound driver I included was the i810 driver, and I built sound support and the driver into the kernel, instead of compiling as modules. After that I had no problems at all with the sound.

Ok. I think I figured it out. It took a bit of messing around to get things to work properly. I reinstalled Slack 10, but instead of using the plain bare.i kernel, I tried using the bareacpi kernel. I was finally able to run alsamixer and unmute the sound card. One problem I did run into, is that while I got sound, I also got a lot of static and white noise with the card. I had to go into various mixers -- alsamixer, Kmix, etc. and mute the Digital1 channel, and one other (can't remember off the top of my head. I'm at work right now.) While I have system sound, I ran into another problem with CD Audio. I was only able to play audio CD's through Kine. KCD and XMMS give me no sound with the audio CD's. If anyone has run into this particular problem, please let me know. Now I'm on to getting my ATI Radeon 9800 to work, and I know from my experience with other distros, getting ATI 3d support is no picnic......