One thing I know is that if pulseaudio is working, you get /dev/dsp devices for each working sound card. These are the standard PCM audio devices for sound card I/O. If alsa is working but pulseaudio is not installed, the standard devices do not exist but alsa and all its control mechanisms such as amixer appear to work. I seem to recall that play and record also worked. Basically everything else seems to rely on alsa being sane. The kernel modules that support the software speech appear to presently be the only working pieces of the audio system. A few years ago, I installed Lenny on a system and neglected to install pulseaudio. I seem to recall that amixer worked fine and I could play some sound files but there were no standard audio devices. Someone told me I needed pulseaudio and that did the trick. This time, alsa is broken so nothing that depends on it can work. There have never yet been any /dev/dsp device files and alsa gives every appearance of being totally broken. martin _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list