Um, can you be more specific? Call me an idiot (It's OK, many do) but I don't understand "-c $WHATEVER".

Is there a way to tell the mixer to use a different interface? Is that what -c does? Can I get a list of those somehow? And shouldn't the alsamixer be able to locate all of the interfaces and let you choose, rather than producing a cryptic error and crashing when you try to set up the sound card?

EDIT: Aha! alsa-base and alsa-utils not installed... seeing if that fixes things... (why doesn't the mixer depend on them?! )

EDIT2: Nope... still futzing...

EDIT3: Ok, this is bigger than alsamixer. I used to be able to get stuff to play with "aplay test.wav" and now even that gives an error. So alsa is borked in my "easy chroot" setup; better get this figured out!

EDIT4: needed to also "apt-get install libasound2-plugins" to get alsamixer working. I can also make "aplay" work now.

The gnome one however still gives the same error... "Sound card properties" causes a segfault...