Subject line says it all. I went through the guide on here to compile it (mainly just wanted to set the arch to i686). That was the only option I changed, but when I recompiled the sound card stopped working. If I try to cat /dev/dsp it gives me a device not found error. Sound worked fine before and lspci still shows it in there. I tried to go back to old kernel and it still didn't work. Could that happen because when I recompilied it did something to that module? This is a laptop and the audio card is ESS Technology ES1978 Maestro 2E (rev 10)

Yes, you might have accidently left out support for loadable modules! Re compile the kernel and look thru everything, leave out what you don't need and watch your P's and Q's LOL..........
all of us have left out something important from the K at one time or another!!

Actually, if I may humbly suggest, don't recompile the Kernel. Go to the ALSA Project, download, then following the instructions here.

I had a similar problem with the ESS 1998 Ver 12. And I've resolved pretty much all of it except getting rid of some old errors. My only guess is that the ALSA 0.9.6 doesn't like to play fully or isn't compiled properly for the sound cards (perhaps not identifying all components).

ALSA is not part of kernel 2.4.22 yet. When you do make modules_install it replaces the /lib/modules/2.4.22 directory. Slack 9.1 has packages built for it and when it installs the necessary modules are dropped into the appropriate places in /lib/modules/2.4.22 dir., so if you are still running 2.4.22 then reinstall the ALSA slackware packages and it should work. But if you are running something other then 2.4.22, then Slack's ALSA package will not install those modules into the correct modules directory.... in that case you have to D/L ALSA like MSMittens suggests.

The alsa package is located on cd #1 in the slackware/ap directory. Just mount your cdrom, use the term to cd /mnt/cdrom/slacware/ap and then run installpkg alsa-*.tgz

OK, I first checked the kernel options and that was set fine. I installed the alsa package (there was only one package that got installed) and I'm still getting device not found. so I started going through the /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa file and manually tried all the comands till I got to the following:

/usr/sbin/alsactl restore

and got the error:

/usr/sbin/alsactl: load_state:1134: No soundcards found...

Don't remember seeing that durring the boot sequence, not sure if just went by too fast or what. I also tried to just run rc.alsa and didn't get any errors. Actually, looking at the file again, I think I know what that's happening. It first checks to see if the dir /proc/asound exists, and it doesn't. So it then tries to load the modules and when running the modprobe command that is there, I don't get anything returned, and there is no "unable to load module" message. Added that to it and now I get an unable to load module message. right now my modules.conf file is completely blank, can I add something in there that it would see?

btw, I am using the 2.4.22 kernel that came with slackware.

The ALSA package included with the Slackware 9.1 CDs is 0.9.6. As of Friday, ALSA has released a new version, 0.9.7, that I have found to be more stable and working.

Perhaps try downloading that?

I was going to remove the packages and reinstall to see if that did it when I noticed that there are 4 packages. In the ap directory there was only one. So I did some searching and found out that the other three are in /l installed all those and it worked fine. Now I just have to figure out why the last compile I did won't show the screen ohh well, that's another topic. Thanks for all the help everyone.

So to summarize all this:
When you recompile the kernel, aparently the alsa modules get removed/overwritten/whatever and no longer exist. To reinstall, mount cdrom into /mnt/cdrom and run the following two commands:

installpkg /mnt/cdrom/slackware/ap/alsa-*.tgz
installpkg /mnt/cdrom/slackware/l/alsa-*.tgz

Reeboot or run /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa and it should be up and running

vrillusions: good catch, I am so sorry I didn't catch the other ALSA pkg's in the /l directory. Glad you got it though You did mean /mnt/cdrom/slackware/ not mandrake right ??? HAH!

Think framebuffer if you are not seeing the screen during bootup...

$%^*& d'oh, fixed now

Don't think that would work, at the end of the startup script I put a `clear`. And I though a clear will clear out the framebuffer as well.