[PD] No ALSA or OSS sound with Debian 9.1 (32 and 64bit) on an "Up Board"

[Ingo]

Hi everybody,

I'm trying to run my rather complex Pd patch on an Up Board (x5-Z8350
CPU,32GB eMMC, 4GB RAM).
The board has the RPi formfactor but is much more powerful.

The up board comes with ubilinux (64bit debian version especially for the Up
Board).
After spending a lot of time with ubilinux and the normal debian9.1 (64bit)
I couldn't stop it from constantly crashing when I opened my patch - for
some unknown reason.
As long as I was using ubilinux sound (alsa) was working at least. Not so
with debian, though.


After giving up with the 64bit OS I installed debian 9.1 (32bit) and it's
running perfectly stable as before with my old amd hardware. No more
crashes!
All externals (except for "iemlib/mp3play~" and "toxy/tot" [not to be found
anymore]) are working as expected.
However, with the normal debian alsa is NOT giving me any sound!

Then I compiled the kernel with oss but oss is not producing any sound
either.

I installed alsa-utils, alsa-base and alsa-tools-gui.
I removed pulseaudio and I made sure alsa-utils would get started on startup
(which it doesn't by default).


Here is what I get from pd when turn on alsa:

ALSA input error (snd_pcm_open): No such file or directory
ALSA output error (snd_pcm_open): No such file or directory

The (external USB-)sound card does show up in the drop down menu of Pd's
audio settings for selection, though.
So it is regognized both by pd and the operating system. I tried several
different USB sound cards with the same result.

Here is what I get when I try to open alsamixer from the LXTerminal:

error when opening mixer: No such file or directory
(original in German: Fehler beim Öffnen des Mixer-Gerätes: Datei oder
Verzeichnis nicht gefunden)


When I use portaudio I'm actually getting sound but it is very quiet as the
sound output is turned down by the system during start up.
I can't find any way to turn the volume of the sound card up, though since I
cannot open any mixer.

Does anybody have an idea how I can get alsa to work?
Debian tells me that "alsa-utils" and "alsa-base" is already installed with
the newest version (1.1.3-1 and 1.0.27+1).


Thanks, Ingo