How to create /dev/dsp ?

[Timothy Murphy]

François Patte wrote:

>> I took a disk out of one computer, and put it in another
>> (more precisely, I took out the Utrabay hard disk from a ThinkPad T20
>> and put it in a ThinkPad T23)
>> and now I am told there is no sound because
>> "Device /dev/dsp does not exist".
> 
> You can create all sound devices running the command : MAKEDEV sound
> 
> The problem is: do these devices will survive to a reboot.
> 
> Had you kudzu enabled when you put your drive in your new laptop? If not
> it is not too late to enable it and reboot and see what happens.
> 
> Another post suggest to run snd-config from the menu "System
> configuration" This can work too.

Thanks for your response.
I now have /dev/dsp, but still no sound!

I discovered, as was suggested, that I did not have an appropriate driver
for the sound card (Intel 82801CA/CAM AC'97 according to lspci)
in my ThinkPad T23.

I had assumed (from a quick look on the web)
that I needed the ALSA OSS-compatibility module snd_emu10k1
but it seems that this is not sufficient on its own.
I now have the module snd_intel8x0 running as well,
and this is shown (eg on running system-config-soundcard)
as the module attached to the soundcard.
This says that the "Default PCM Device" (whatever that means)
is "Intel ICH [Intel 82801CA-ICH3]".

What I don't understand is the various aliases that it has been suggested
one should put in /etc/modprobe.conf .
I now have
------------------------------------------
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

#alias sound-slot-0 snd_emu10k1
#alias snd-card-0 snd_emu10k1
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
------------------------------------------

But I have no idea what these instructions mean
and have been unable to find information on them on the web.

(The official [tldp] Linux Sound-HOWTO is dated 2001, 
and seems more or less useless.)


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland