Other apps talk to /dev/dsp ...

[Patrick Wiseman]

... what's the mixer's problem?

Sound works fine on my laptop (xmms plays, eg).  But xfce4-mixer 
apparently won't acknowledge that my sound device is /dev/dsp.  When run 
from the command line, it reports:

alsa: Mixer attach default error: No such device

I'm not using ALSA.  I installed alsa-utils and ran alsaconf but it found 
no PnP, PCI, or legacy driver; so I got rid of it.  My laptop has the 
maestro chipset which is found and activated at boot.  'dmesg | grep 
maestro' reports:

maestro: version 0.15 time 15:07:46 Dec  4 2005
maestro: Configuring ESS Maestro 2E found at IO 0xEE00 IRQ 11
maestro:  subvendor id: 0x00011179
maestro: not attempting power management.
maestro: AC97 Codec detected: v: 0x414b4d00 caps: 0x0 pwr: 0xf
maestro: 1 channels configured.

So, is xfce4-mixer useless to me, or can I get it to recognise that I _do_ 
in fact have a functioning sound system?  It was working before a fairly 
recent upgrade on my Debian testing system.  I'd rather not compile from 
scratch and so defeat Debian's packaging, but is there something funny 
about how it's compiled for Debian perhaps?

Patrick