Ok, here's what has happened. I have an AIW Radeon 9700 Pro video card with a KT400 mb w/ agp 3.0. I have been trying for over a month to get the video card to work with 3D acceleration. My time has finally paid off. Last night I got it working with full agp 3.0 support, getting that to work is another discussion.
Anyway, part of getting the video card to work included compiling a new 2.4.21 kernel (as opposed to the stock 2.4.20 kernel that comes with Slack). When I used the 2.4.20 kernel my SB Audigy card was auto detected and worked like a champ. Now, after compiling the custom updated kernel, I get a /dev/mixer not found error when the xserver starts up. I have tried recompiling the emu10k1 driver both directly into the kernel and as a module. Neither has worked. This is all I need to start enjoying games on winex. Is there some other obscure module that also has to be loaded for an audigy card to work or something? Any help will be grealy appreciated.
Thanks.

hey jhahn
First off, maybe a stupid question, but what are the permissions of /dev/mixer and /dev/dsp ?? ( no reason why they'd have changed but i just thought id ask.)
My Audigy is working fine using emu10k1 on top of ac97_codec on top of soundcore. I was getting errors (have you check dmesg and logs?) about sound-slot-0, sound-service which were fixed by adding
to /etc/modules.conf. Again, no reason why this should have changed from when it worked with the previous kernel, but something to try. There shouldn't be any more modules required - ac97_codec is there if emu10k1 is, generally and as far as i remember is just needed for extra functionality.
Anyway, some things to try.

Well, there must be some sort of kernel quirk that hasn't been fixed yet. I set up the audigy as a module and compiled the kernel that way. After loading the new kernel, when I would run 'modprobe emu10k1' it would give me a "module not found" error. I could run 'insmod ac_97 codec' just fine, but for some reason it wasn't detecting the audigy module. So I went to the audigy project site at sourceforge.net and downloaded the latest *nix driver for the audigy card. Installed the module that way and it works like a champ now. So my fix is to use a newer module version than what came with the 2.4.21 kernel. I just added 'modprobe emu10k1' and 'insmod ac_97 codec' to '/etc/rc.d/rc.modules' and now it auto loads it at boot time. Problem solved.

Also, I had to modify the permission of /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer.

congrats! I just managed to stop mine working (ironically enough) with a new kernel, I'll give that latest driver a try.

...ten minutes later ...

ahh... well that worked.