I wanted to play a game of Quake3 against someone, and have Skype or Teamspeak open at the same time, for obvious reasons. Somehow, it reported the sound device being in use: “device or resource busy”. This doesn’t make any sense, because my card can do hardware mixing, and also because all other games work fine with Skype or Teamspeak active.

I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but this is how it can be fixed: 

# echo "quake3.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss
# echo "quake3.x86 0 0 disable" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss
# echo "quake3-smp.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss

Happy fragging 🙂