Xfce took away my sound

[Christian Johansen]

A couple of days ago I installed xfce 4.0.5 Upon entering xfce for the
first time, the sound all of the sudden dissapeared. I have been using
ALSA for a long time, and it's been working perfectly. I tried to go
back to fluxbox, but no sound.

I found out that xcfe had done som crazy stuff with the permission for
/dev/dsp and /dev/music/mixer (and maybe several more??). I fixed this
by cmod'ing them both to 777 (which I guess is a NO-NO). Ok, I got
xmms playing sound again with OSS, but not ALSA. What can I do to get
ALSA back up working? And what are the right permissions for /dev/dsp
and /dev/music/mixer?

When trying ALSA I'm told to check that my soundcard is configured
right, that I'm using the right plugin and to check that no other
program is using the soundcard, which is the same error as I got with
OSS before modifying the permissions. I don't know what happened or
what to do from here, can anyone help me?

Grip is also rendered useless at the time. It says

>grip
audio_alsa: no cards found!


It also ouputs: "Unable to initialize /dev/cdrom !" ??? What has happened here?

I have later changed to Xfce 4.2 but the problem is still there. Both
ALSA and my cdrom are now not working.

ls -l /dev/cdrom
lr-xr-xr-x  1 root root 13 Jan 21 21:45 /dev/cdrom -> cdroms/cdrom0

Looks right to me. I'm on a gentoo system with kdm login manager. I've
moved from fluxbox to xfce.

Can anyone help?