Slackware "lost" /dev/dsp, no sound
 

yesterday I used swaret to update my system from slackware 9.1 to slackware-current. Everything was working fine yesterday (my sound system needed to be changed from auto detect to OSS however, ALSA and Autodetect failed to open my sound card /dev/dsp). Last night though, my system locked while running a screen saver and I had to do a hard reboot. When I got back to slackware I got a different error when I used startx to boot KDE. This time, the sound server could not start because /dev/dsp (or rather the device linked to /dev/dsp) does not exist. I tried cat /dev/dsp to confirm it and it does say that the device does not exist, so none of the options for sound server work (OSS, threaded OSS, ALSA, etc). This has always been my default sound device and it was working fine yesterday. I have an Intel i810 laptop motherboard with an AC97 integrated sound card. Does anyone know what I can do to rememdy this problem? I may end up having to do a fresh install if I can't get it working again.

did you upgrade the 'arts' package? I had a similar problem and that was the cause.

Try

swaret --upgrade arts

yes, I've already upgraded the arts package, all of my packages are already synched with slackware-current. I get the feeling that this doesn't have something to do with Arts/KDE though, I booted into Gnome, XFce, etc etc and got similar errors, the sound card not being connected to the appropriate dev entry.

well, I managed to figure out a workaround to the problem, apparently slackware didn't like that I upgraded the 4 alsa packages (or possibly just one of them) from version 0.9.6 which was packaged with the disks to the current 1.0.3, I downgraded the packages and my sound server works again, no idea why.

chmod a+rw /dev/dsp

(you might need to do it with /dev/mixer to)

To set the permissions so that everybody can access it.

When you upgraded the devs packages the permissions probably got reset to their default values.

Did you upgrade the kernel with swaret? I think you have to if you want to update your alsa packages with swaret. You have to remove "kernel" from the exclude list in swaret.conf.

If you do an upgrade with swaret make sure you double check your REPOS_ROOT I added the list of repos that you find on the swaret.org site and have since come to find out that alot of the packages that you may get have a 1rob or jto listed someplace in the name, problem is that those files are "custom tailored" and they may cause problems with your standard install. They require specific libraries that are 1rob or .jto libraries, and if you dont have them then your packages may not work like you would think, I'm having a probelm with my alsa not working and I think this may be why. I did a swaret --upgrade and had the sites listed in my REPOS_ROOT and I remember those "special files" being listed and installed. I'm about to whipe my system clean and re-do an --update to see if this fixes the probelm. If it does then I'll know that this was the reason why my alsa wasnt working even though I had installed the packages installed they didnt have the right libraries. Anyways if this IS the problem I'll let ya know.

no, I haven't updated my kernel via swaret, I'm reticent to do so because the last time I tried to update my kernel in Slackware the system wouldn't boot up. Thanks for all the help though.

compile the kernel and add support for the appropriate sound card.(kernel.org)