sound works, but how?

[Dieter]

> ... mostly, they complain
> that they weren't able to open the /dev/dsp0

Do they say *why* they weren't able to open /dev/dsp0 ?

> I've tried this both as a
> regular user and as root, to get past the permission problem (I wasn't
> sure) but could it still, somehow, be a permission problem?

Doing things as root is of course dangerous.  Try chmod 666 /dev/dsp0
instead.