Wayne Ward wrote:
Hi, I have installed debian from (CD) Steve Hunger's book "Debian GNU/Linux Bible" and I'm now trying to get GNOME up and running. When I enter the command to start GNOME i get the error that "/dev/dsp No such device".This distribution is with potato and Linux 2.2r2. The book is copyrighted 2001.From what I can make out is that this hassomething to do with sound, which I don't have.How can I fix this? TIA Wayne
Three things:1) the 2.2 kernel is pretty old. It may not have support for your sound device. If you have network capability, you might want to upgrade to a 2.4 or even a 2.6 kernel.
2) you need kernel support for your hardware (in this case your sound system). This support can be compiled into the kernel, but more often nowadays, it's "bolted onto" the kernel as a module. You should be able to use the app "modconf" to search for a module that matches your hardware, and to insert it into the kernel ("bolt it on", "plug it in").
3) your user also needs to have permissions to access the sound device. This is normally done by adding that user to the "audio" group. Entering "groups" will show you the groups you're in; entering (as root) the "adduser wayneward audio" would add the user 'wayneward' to the audio group; wayneward would then need to log out/log in to make the change take affect.
-- Kent