My thanks to a list member who wrote me off the list and told me about the aabuild and aadebug scripts on the alsa site. I ran the aadebug script and found that the biggest problem seems to be that ALSA couldn't find my sound card after plug and play registered it. Putting in the sound card driver as a built-in to the kernel rather than a module seems to have cured that problem and I may actually have it working. Now, for the next part: Since ALSA is part of the kernel, I need some command-line tools to take the place of aplayer and amixer which were in the old distribution. As a computer user who is blind, I do not use X windows because there isn't a truly working interface to X that makes it talk to us yet. It is in the works, but it has been there for about a decade although it really is getting a lot closer. I presently have aumix on the system and it did adjust some of the controls on the sound card under the 2.4.19 kernel and the OSS modules, but I gather that it doesn't talk to /dev/mixer, etc. The old ALSA utilities I had on here had Amixer and aplayer and dated back to December of 2001. They don't even try to work with the present setup. So, my question for now is, are there any command-line-based applications that replace aplayer, amixer and something I saw called alsamixer? This is all a bit confusing since there is a lot of software that is based on the old ALSA which doesn't seem to do anything at all in the new setup. Thanks to all. Martin McCormick
