Slackware upgrade woes

[Adam Myrow]

Try removing the alsa-driver package, grabbing the source code, and 
re-building from source.  It's rather poorly explained, but the Alsa 
modules seem to depend on what else was compiled into the kernel, and 
thus, seem to be specific to the kernel for which they installed.  In 
plain English, I've had to re-compile, not just reinstall the Alsa drivers 
every time I build a new kernel.  2.6.X kernels have Alsa built in, but I 
still prefer to leave it out and compile Alsa separately because the 2.6.X 
Alsa drivers are often older versions than what you can get stand-alone.

Here is how to rebuild ALSA from source.  You could do it manually, but 
this method basically re-builds the Alsa-driver package based on your 
current kernel.  Assuming you have a full Slackware set, insert disk 4 and 
change to the "src/l" directory.  Do a "cp -R" on the "alsa-driver" 
directory to put it on your hard drive.  Now, cd into the newly-created 
directory and give the "alsa-driver.SlackBuild" file execute permissions. 
Then, run that as root.  This will compile Alsa-driver, and stuff the 
output into a package in /tmp.  When it completes, you can do a "tar tzf" 
on the .tgz file to make sure everything is in it.  In particular, make 
sure the modules are in place.  Once the package has been created in /tmp, 
remove any existing alsa-driver package, and install the one in /tmp.  It 
will contain modules based on your current kernel, and will hopefully 
behave itself.  If you switch to kernel 2.6, you will have to modify the 
script.  It hard-codes the kernel version and also assumes that modules 
end in .o.  If you wish to upgrade to a later version of Alsa when it 
comes out, I'd just say to build from source and remove the Slackware 
package.  Just be sure to copy the rc.alsa script from /etc/rc.d before 
you remove the Alsa package, so it can be put back in place.  It takes 
care of loading the modules, and runs alsactl to restore your mixer 
settings.