Back from a holiday, I saw this question about sound hangs with esd running: <http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2004/07/msg00287.html><http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome/2004/06/msg00251.html> says that the esound package in Debian is too old and the package maintainer seems unresponsive. I googled and found a newer ppc package (rpm), with these binaries, esd and alsa work fine here.
Harry