Can't get the sound going at all. I installed fresh CRUX 2.3, KDE with kdemultimedia package, esound, compiled Soundcard (Realtek ALC850 integrated in NVidia 6100) support in kernel, esound has started, still have a message popping up in KDE: Device: default can't be opened for playback (No such device).
I suggest against using esound, it sucks. The only added benefit for using sound daemons is forwarding sound through your network, if you don't need it, then why use it? If your drivers don't support hardware mixing and you need it, try using the dmix plugin from alsa. Refer to the alsa documentation for detailed instructions. Finally, if you still want to use a sound daemon, use artsd instead of esound. Also, make sure you select alsa as the sound device.
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No devices /dev/dsp or anything like that, only: ls /dev/*
/dev/dsp is for OSS only. If you need it, use the oss layer modules. Notice that new versions of skype and flash already support alsa, so OSS isn't needed for them anymore.
Any suggestions, please?
About permissions: There are several approaches to setting up permissions for the alsa devices. One of them is using the "audio" group. You can use udev to set up the device permissions at boot time for the "audio" group, or for everybody. I think the best approach in a multi-user environment is to chown /dev/snd/* devices at login time in /etc/X11/kdm/Xstartup. The only problem with this is that KDE support for "user switching" will run Xstartup when logging in any additional users. This will chown the sound devices to the new user, eliminating them for the first user logged in. If you come up with something better, let me know. Regards, Alan