[Sound] No sound at all - help needed

[Lloyd Brady <lbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm hoping someone can help me. I'm a bit of a novice and am fumbling my way 
around....

I'm running Red hat 7.3, kernel 2.4.18-3, with an ESS Solo-1 (ess1969??) 
soundcard. Until recently I had been able to play audio on the pc, but not 
record through the line-in socket on the soundcard.

After fiddling a bit to try to get the system to record, I installed and ran 
alsaconf, and selected what I though was the correct soundcard driver (but I 
think was mistaken). Since then I have had nothing but silence from Linux, 
and am in desperate need of some aural relief!

Now when I boot the pc I get the following error message from the sound 
server: 

"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."

Could someone please advise me how I can get my soundcard back to where it was 
(at least), and possibly how to even get to the point where I can record 
audio (preferably in layman's terms if possible).

In anticipation,

Lloyd