I have spent nearly two hours trying to figure why I get no sound when I do a console dial on Asterisk. I was getting the error ‘Unable to re-open DSP device /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy‘. As far as I was concerned my sound card was not being utilised by any application so I figured Asterisk was acting up on me.

Well I guess I was wrong. The soft phone (Egika) which loads immediately after booting was in fact the culprit. I quit the application. It is should be noted that there is a vast difference between quit and close in the context of the application, so using the cross (X) on the Egika window is not what one wants to do. After quitting I loaded Asterisk followed by Egika and both worked as expected.

I am satisfied with finding the cause of the problem but I am still curious about why Egika acts so possesively. The application uses an ALSA plugin and I thought the whole point of this sound architecture was to promote selfless and not possessive behaviour from applications using it! May be I am just annoyed orthere is something I am missing!!