Check out what sound card you have (`/sbin/lspci` shows the
devices you have installed). The relevant line looked like this for
me:
Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1983S
Maestro-3i PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 10)
Of course, to be able to do anything with sound, you'll have to have
the right drivers or modules in your kernel. I was using the plain
old stock 2.4.20 kernel, which had the Maestro enabled as a
module (see Section 5 for kernel info & caveats),
so all it took was a little creative guessing and a `locate
maestro` to figure out which module it would be. Then all I had to
do was insert it:
spycellar:~# modprobe maestro3
and to make sure it got inserted at boot time, by adding it
to /etc/modules.
Make sure your sound devices exist (/dev/dsp*). Mine did.
At this point, try catting a wave file to your sound device, to see if
that did the trick:
spycellar:~# cat wavfile.wav > /dev/dsp
Now you're almost there. You just need to add your username to the audio group, and then you should be set.