No sound in Dapper

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Tuesday 19 June 2007, Stew Schneider wrote:
> finding a device or not being able to open it. kmix also cannot find any
> valid mixers. alsamixer gives an open error. ls /dev/dsp gives nothing
> and neither does /dev/snd
>
> I'm almost certain I solved this one time, but don't recall how. Any hints?

Did this just happen after some recent round of security updates, I wonder?

Now that you mention it, I finally dumped Dapper for exactly this reason.  I 
put the missing bits back in /dev by hand (mknod), but nothing was working.  
I did have the appropriate ALSA kernel modules and so forth, but it just 
seemed like even though I manually recreated /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p and such, they 
weren't "hooked up" to anything running in the kernel.

This was a Dapper box that had previously worked perfectly.  I go for long 
stretches without turning my speakers on, so I can't put my finger on exactly 
what broke it.  It just all but *has* to be related to some update, because 
all I ever did to it was click the Adept Updater icon once in awhile, after 
it had reached about 5 or more updates waiting.  Since I could fathom no 
software-related reason why this should have happened all of a sudden, I 
initially blamed it on my hardware tanking, but after I replaced my soundcard 
with a different one, I still had the same problem.  I even tried running my 
backup drive, in case it was down to some weird drive problem.

It was a real mystery.  In the end, trying to fix this pissed me off to no 
end, so I nuked Dapper in a merry fit of glee, and installed Ubuntu 
Studio/Feisty in its place.

Everything is working now.  There was nothing wrong with my hardware.  The 
mystery shall remain forever unsolved.  (I've been dealing with "get my sound 
working" issues since people were having to deal with the problem of 
replacing the built-in kernel OSS sound system with ALSA 0.5.x by hand, and I 
don't stump easily.  I was baffled.)
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre