Re: [Alsa-user] Newbie question - cannot get sound to work in Ubuntu

[James S. <Sha...@ea...>]

> I'm a bit confused about the rest of your comment.
> The only file called devfs is a directory which has
> two subdirectories, neither of which seems to have
> anything interesting in it (one is empty). And I
> can't find a file called snddevices anywhere, but
> might have mistyped (I'm not currently on the Linux
> machine and can't get to it to check up).

In the alsa-driver package (alsa-project.org) there's a script named snddevices.  It's in the root path of that tarball.  Basically it creates the devices your drivers/applications need to access to do sound.  Many distros set this up for you if you install the needed packages.  But assuming a more basic LFS approach, you need to set them up yourself.  You seem to be missing those devices.  Hence the snd_ctl_open error.

ls -al /dev/* | grep -i "audio" | wc -l
23

lsmod | grep -i "snd" | wc -l
21

That's what mine lists.  Various /dev/ devices.

/dev/mixer*
/dev/sequencer*
/dev/dsp*
/dev/audio*

If devfs or udev didn't create these for you, then you're left with the old mknod methods.  Which the script alsa-driver/snddevices uses to create the devices.

pgrep udev
pgrep devfs
(if you don't get a pid number, then it's not running)

Otherwise you may just need to:

apt-get install alsa alsa-base 
(and various other alsa* packages.)

Or run the snddevices script.

find / -iname '*snddevice*'

HTH