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Alsa drivers are muted on boot-up by default. Run "alsamixer" and set the main (leftmost) volume setting (hint "alsamixer" has strange key settings).
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"alsactl store" stores your current settings in /etc/asound.state and "alsactl restore" restores the settings from the same file.
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You can use OSS compatible applications by loading the OSS layer in ALSA either by compiling it in the kernel or loading it as a module.
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ALSA allows multiple applications to access the sound driver at the same time. You need to have a .asoundrc file like the one enclosed.
Now in order to accomplish (4) there were a number of different daemons written in the past esd, artsd, jackd, ...
As Ben said:
Your are in a maze of sound daemons all alike.
One of them throws a sound at your sound card. It gets stuck.
Oh, dear!
Your process seems to have killed itself (D) and the sound driver with it ...
... I haven't done this before but do you want me to reboot?
The .asoundrc
file
pcm.!default { type plug slave.pcm "dmixer" } pcm.dsp { type plug slave.pcm "dmixer" } pcm.dmixer { type dmix ipc_key 1024 slave { pcm "hw:0,0" period_time 0 period_size 1024 buffer_size 8192 #periods 128 rate 44100 } bindings { 0 0 1 1 } } ctl.mixer0 { type hw card 0 }