[ale] sound disappeared (debian)

[Jim Philips]

On Friday 07 January 2005 03:00 pm, Jay Loden wrote:
> I have had repeated problems on my debian laptop.  I had no sound (wrong
> permissions, which I corrected).  I got it working for about a month, only
> for it to randomly disappear yesterday upon rebooting.
>
> When trying to configure the sound in Control Panel (KDE) I get the
> following error:
>
> 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
>
> I checked and /dev/dsp does exist, it's a symlink to /dev/dsp0

As I recall, this is a bogus error message in KDE. Check your processes (ps 
-ef | grep artsd) and see if artsd is out there. If it isn't, try starting 
artsd at the command line. If it gives you errors, report them back here. 
Anyway, forget what it's telling you about /dev/dsp.