Sound problems

symptoms
When KDE starts, an error message pops up saying "Error while initializing the sound driver: device /dev/dsp can't be opened (no such device)". Then sound no work. Wah.

solution
In a FreekBox, this is generally a hardware problem with your sound card. But if you're working on a non-freekbox system, here's a method for troubleshooting this error:

guest@freekbox:~$ ls -l /dev/dsp lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 May  3 17:37 /dev/dsp -> /dev/dsp0 the lrwxlrwxlrwx bit means everyone in the world has read/write/execute permission on the file, which is a link to /dev/dsp0. freekbox:~# ln -s /dev/dsp0 /dev/dsp guest@freekbox:~$ ls -l /dev/dsp crw-rw-rw- 1 root audio 14, 3 Mar 23 12:28 /dev/dsp0 freekbox:/dev# ./MAKEDEV audio guest@freekbox:~$ groups guest dialout cdrom floppy audio dip video games users On a FreekBox-type computer, it's rare that users will be added improperly and not be in the audio group.
 * make sure /dev/dsp exists, and that the group has write access:
 * If /dev/dsp doesn't exist, you can use ln to create it (as root)
 * But you need to make sure /dev/dsp0 exists too:
 * You can make /dev/dsp0 with MAKEDEV if it doesn't exist.
 * Finally, make sure the user is in the audio group:

The last set of possibilities are all hardware problems, so if you've gotten this far, try a different sound card. User:Dave says that the AE Vortex PCI sound card is a frequent culprit, so if you've got one of these, offer it to Dave to see if it will help him.

--ideath 12:46, 5 Aug 2005 (PDT) Jeff 03:09, 6 Aug 2005 (PDT)