I have just installed slack 10.0 on my machine and I cannot get the sound to work. I'm running it on a notebook computer with a P4 2.4 gig processor, and the sound is built on to the motherboard. When I ran Windows it recognized my sound drivers as a AC'97 Sound Card.

My problem now is that when I log on to KDE it tells me:

Informational - artsmessage:

Sound server informational message:
Error while initializing the sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (No such device)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device.

When I look at the dsp entry from the terminal, it states this:
root@napps:/dev# ls -l dsp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2004-10-12 03:28 dsp -> dsp0
root@napps:/dev#

and when I do the same for dsp0:

root@napps:/dev# ls -l dsp0
crw-rw--w- 1 root audio 14, 3 2003-08-29 16:47 dsp0
root@napps:/dev#

anyway, as you can see I am already logged in as root, so its not merely a problem of accessing the sound files. I don't know how to proceed and any help would be appreciated,

thanks,

Did you run alsaconf?
If not, run it, it should load the correct modules for your card.
Then run alsamixer and set the correct mixer volumes.
Finally run: alsactl store

thanks,
I ran alsaconf but it didnt detect any legacy drivers. where can i find drivers, and when i have them, where should they be installed to?

Did it detect something? Or just didn't detect Legacy cards?

remove all alsa packages with pkgtool and then compile some fresh alsa source ...
you should also configure with ./configure --with-cards=XXXX , where XXXX is the module for ypur soundcard. Possible cards are seq-dummy, dummy, virmidi, mtpav, serial-u16550,
mpu401, serialmidi, ad1816a, ad1848, cs4231,
cs4232, cs4236, es968, es1688, es18xx,
gusclassic, gusextreme, gusmax, interwave,
interwave-stb, opti92x-ad1848, opti92x-cs4231,
opti93x, sb8, sb16, sbawe, wavefront, als100,
azt2320, cmi8330, dt019x, opl3sa2, sgalaxy,
sscape, pc98-cs4232, msnd-pinnacle, ali5451,
atiixp, atiixp-modem, au8810, au8820, au8830,
azt3328, bt87x, cs46xx, cs4281, emu10k1,
korg1212, mixart, nm256, rme32, rme96, rme9652,
hdsp, trident, ymfpci, als4000, cmipci, ens1370,
ens1371, es1938, es1968, maestro3, fm801,
fm801-tea575x, ice1712, ice1724, intel8x0,
intel8x0m, sonicvibes, via82xx, vx222, pdplus,
hdspm, emu10k1x, audigyls, azx, powermac,
sa11xx-uda1341, usb-audio, usb-usx2y, vxpocket,
vxp440, pdaudiocf, sun-amd7930, sun-cs4231,
harmony

That helped me ...hope it works for you :P

to find out the name of ur sound card use lspci -v (as root) or after you boot have a look at dmesg to see if it's detected.

thank you both gbonvehi and sys7em for your help.

i did as you both said and this is what i can say:
when i did the alsaconf steps, and wrote alsactl store, it didnt change anything.
so then i tried what sys7em said and used pkgtool to remove the alsa packages. i downloaded the newest drivers, libs, etc from the website, and i ran lspci -v to find out my module was 8280IDB (so im currently installing this and hopin it works).
thanks guys

hmm, i ran ./configure with the modules:
8280IDB
8280
ICH4 and
0017

and always it went well until the final line which came out as:
checking for which soundcards to compile driver for... configure: error: Unknown soundcard 0017

so yeah, here is the output of lspci -v:
0:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB (ICH4) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
Subsystem: COMPAL Electronics Inc: Unknown device 0017
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 9
I/O ports at 1c00 [size=256]
I/O ports at 18c0 [size=64]
Memory at d0000c00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
Memory at d0000800 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

i dont know what the module number is, and im trying right now to find it on the net. but again, im lost

8280IDB
8280
ICH4 and
0017

???

Remeber that the possible cards are:
Your sound card is : Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB (ICH4) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)

So try : ./configure --with-cards=intel8x0 or
./configure --with-cards=intel8x0m .. I think those are the modules for your card ...

Good Luck ...

EXCELLENT! that worked! I did it with intel8x0 and it all went thru. but i have downloaded not just the drivers, but the libraries and utilities as well. and now that i did ./configure, make and make install, i went to the libraries file and tried to run ./configure here as well but it gives the message:
checking for alsa-driver package... not found
Fatal error: Install alsa-driver package at first...

i dont understand what i must do. i ran ./configure, make and make install, but i guess im missing a step somewhere. do you know?
thanks

If you installed them, just reboot the system and, assuming hotplug runs at startup, it should load the drivers.