Any idea why I can't record?

[Adam Myrow]

Well, I must say that the last few days have been quite an adventure!  I
just got a brand new Dell Dimension 8300 which I heavily customized.  I
finally have it dual booting between Windows XP Professional and Slackware
9.1 In the process, I learned that serial ATA isn't supported very well in
2.4.X kernels, so I had to upgrade to 2.6.7 to avoid hangs at boot time.
Oddly, Serial ATA is hidden among the SCSI low-level drivers.  In fact,
with my particular chipset, serial ATA is handled like a sort of SCSI
emulation!  So, Linux is now treating my hard drive as if it were SCSI.
So, they were bragging about how you no longer need SCSI emulation to use
CD writers, but now, the kernel does its own SCSI emulation to support
Serial ATA.  Oh well, at least it works.

Anyway, part of this upgrading involved upgrading to Alsa 1.0.5A.  After I
got the modules correctly installed, the sound card was detected
automatically.  It's an SB Live 5.1.  Actually, "lspci" says it's an "SB
Live! Value."  So, the sound card came up OK, and I eventually got
settings so that I could hear sound.  There are two problems, however.  I
can't record anything, and the sound card is acting like a single-channel
sound card, whereas in Windows, it clearly is multi-channel.  Any attempt
to record results in errors to the effect of "no such device."  For
example, using SOX to record results in:

Send break (control-c) to end recording
sox: Can't open input file '/dev/dsp': No such device

Trying to use arecord gives a similar message:

ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:1155:(snd_pcm_hw_open) open /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c failed: No
such
device
arecord: main:507: audio open error: No such device

I have the OSS-compatibility modules loaded.  Any ideas what could be
wrong?  Here is the output from lsmod with the Speakup software
synthesizer in use and Flite as my synthesizer.

Module                  Size  Used by
speakup_sftsyn          5228  0
speakupmain            56648  1 speakup_sftsyn
snd_pcm_oss            51336  0
snd_mixer_oss          19328  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_emu10k1x           13576  0
snd_pcm                91648  2 snd_pcm_oss,snd_emu10k1x
snd_timer              25856  1 snd_pcm
snd_ac97_codec         71172  1 snd_emu10k1x
snd                    52868  6
snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_emu10k1x,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_ac97_codec
soundcore               8672  1 snd
snd_page_alloc         11784  2 snd_emu10k1x,snd_pcm