q. I can't get Quake 3 to run with sound? What do I do!!!?? It says it can't open /dev/dsp. Help ME!!!!

a. One reason for this could be that something else is using your sound card. Possibly the ARTS (KDE) or ESD (gnome/Enlightenment) sound daemons. Try to quit them before running quake3, either by opening the sound control centre settings and disabling or switching off the sound server. Or you can type killall esd or killall artsd from a terminal window.

Also, unfortunately some onboard (AC97) motherboard sound hardware doesn't support all the functions Quake 3 requires and may give the /dev/dsp error. Some people have got around this by running quake3 with artsdsp -m quake3 or esdsp -m quake3 from a terminal. This unfortunately results in some noticeable sound lag in game. The real solution for this is to go to ebay and buy an old SB Live! pci card if you really want to play Quake3 in Linux. You can get them for less than a fiver.

Labels: ARTS, ESD