well, i did that first part again and for some reason the sound doesnt work at all now. I logged in as root, stayed in text mode, did an alsaconf, alsamixer, set the volumes how i wanted, alsactl store, and then i tried the sound with mpg123 and i get nothing. I'm guessing that what you were trying to tell me before was to do a chmod 666 on /dev/dsp* and and /dev/mixer* ? i had already done that, i the problem i was having was that my alsaconf settings were being reset to nothing whenever i started X (although now i have another problem )