FAQ032

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The FAQs have been reorganized. The new location of this question is FAQ#I get "no such file or directory" errors from all alsa-utils. What's wrong?

I get "no such file or directory" errors from all alsa-utils. What's wrong?

If you are sure you have ALSA installed and all necessary modules loaded into the kernel, then one reason could be a version mismatch. Especially version mismatches across major version numbers [like 0.9.7 -> 1.0.2] are bad.

If you're running a 2.6.x ( x <=5 ) series kernel with ALSA compilied into the kernel, you might try running the MAKEDEV.snd script found in the scripts/ directory of your Linux source tree. If the /dev/snd directory is not present, this script will build and populate it with the appropriate devices, which very well might fix your problem. Note: this script must be run as root.

I use ALSA v1.0.8, and a kernel 2.4.20. All the alsa devicefiles in /dev/snd are present. My old OSS applications thru an OSS-emulation layer snd-pcm-oss work properly. But still I can NOT run ANY application from alsa-utils package. What's wrong now? HELP!! The messages are: "Unknown PCM default: no such file or directory" ; "Unknown CLT hw:0,0: no such file or directory" ; and so on...