If you happen to have another computer running linux that has a soundcard in it, and it is on a network with the computers whos sound died, then you can make all your ESD capable apps use a remote ESD host. its fairly easy to do. first, you must start ESD on the remote machine in a mode where it will accept connections over tcp. `esd -public -tcp -port 9999` thats what i do. -public makes esd accept connections from hosts other than localhost, -tcp makes it listen on a tcp socket, and -port makes it listen on a particular port.
on the client side, all you have to do to tell apps to use a remote ESD host is to set the ESPEAKER variable, i do `export ESPEAKER=laptop.home:9999`. it works well to just set that in your console before you startx. One thing to note, is that this is proably not a good idea to do on a public network without some sort of firewalling, unless you really want anyone to be able to make your computer make noise. also, DONT RUN ESD AS ROOT. Just give a user rw access to /dev/dsp and it should work fine if you run it on a non-privledged port.