USE="-oss -alsa" emerge crossfire-client It fails trying to compile the sound server, which shouldn't be built. The solution is to make the building of "sound-src" conditional on having either alsa or oss support: if use alsa || use oss ; then emake -j1 -C sound-src || die "sound building failed" fi With that change in the ebuild, it works perfectly.
fixed in CVS. Thanks for the bug report and patch.