MEPIS + Audacity = Trouble

[clovervidia]

Hey guys,
I have an old dell laptop with 512m memory, 10g hard drive and runs MEPIS 8.
I wanted to record myself practicing my instrument, a violin.
I thought hard of a recorder and I installed Audacity through synaptic, or whichever the package manager is.
After installing, I test the on board mic (amazingly it wasn't just a hole =) and it worked.
But everything blew up when I tried playback.
I could not play it back. This was the error: Error while opening sound device. Please check the output device settings and project sample rate.
I looked in the settings and sure enough, there was no device listed or available under Output.
@[email protected] Any suggestions or answers?
Thanks!

clovervidia

[steve]

Does other sound work ok on your machine? If not, fix that first.

Can you set Audacity Preferences to use ALSA?

If other sound is working, try installing ALSAMixer - run ALSA mixer and check that there are both recording and playback devices available.

One of the problems here is that many Linux distros package old and/or customised versions of Audacity. If possible you should build the latest (beta) version from the source code.