OK, I've been prodding a bit into the sound issue. Here's what I've got.
1) I definitely have R|W permissions on the sound card. I checked. The WQ3 mod of OpenArena works fine, as do all other sound applications I've tried.
2) I do get errors in the console, here they are:
------- sound initialization -------
Could not mmap dma buffer PROT_WRITE|PROT_READ
trying mmap PROT_WRITE (with associated better compatibility / less performance code)
/dev/dsp: Input/output error
Could not mmap /dev/dsp
3) I found this error on google and there were two main responses. One response indicate that it is an OSS compatibility issue that could be solved by setting the right values in proc. Unfortunately, their example was for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and I haven't figured out how to transfer it to smokinguns. I recall that my old system, did in fact echo some value to /proc, but I didn't preserve it when I rebuilt my system. Here is the /proc entry they suggest:
echo "et.x86 0 0 disable" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss
The entry I recall (very fuzzy) was more like
echo "quake3-smp.x86 XXXXXX" >proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss"
The other response, was to run it with the wrapper script for ALSA->OSS compatibility
$> aoss smokinguns
This approach sort of worked in that I got sound, but it was garbled to the point of being a techno-industrial repetetitve noise ala Skinny Puppy.
I'm mostly posting this In case any of this helps ring some bells, or give others a place to start. If I get it solved, I'll definitely let you know.