After finally getting a duel-boot system up and running, I've run into the following problems that I can't seem to resolve despite lots of consulting documentation and upgrading packages.

1. In Konsole, several characters are not being displayed correctly. The '-' character is replaced by a small box most of the time, or random non-characters. Other characters are similarly corrupted at times. I tried upgrading both the Kernal and KDE to their most recent versions to no avail. I have Japanese language support installed, but US English is set as my primary language. Not sure if this might be a contributing factor.

2. I cannot play any sort of sound file from KDE. Any attempt to double click on a sound file from Konquerer will simply crash it, and if I directly load a file from any sound player it will simply do nothing. My sound card is a Creative Labs Live! card, I think a 5.1 gamer. The KDE test sound works fine, as does sound from some programs, such as Chromium.

3. A couple of programs, for instance FreeCiv, simply don't load when I attempt to run them.

This is my first experience with Linux, so at this point I really have no idea what to do, although I'm beginning to suspect that my install might be corrupt. Any other ideas, short of nuking the install and starting over?

Welcome to LQ, Whilt.

2: In order to test your sound card, could you:
a) go to a console and type (as root) lsmod
b) find a sound file and use the 'play' command (from a console), eg play /usr/share/sounds/something.wav

3: If you know the command to launch the programs, doing so from the command line (from a console) should give you might give you some errors. These are helpful.

Also, did you get any errors when you installed it? What makes you think that your install might corrupt?

Thanks for replying Thymox. I followed your directions, and the following happened:

when running lsmod, in addition to getting emu10k1 listed as a loaded module (the driver for the Live series, I believe) ac97_codec is installed as well. This is the driver for onboard sound for my motherboard. However, I disabled this feature in bios. Not sure how it was recognized/found, but it could be causing conflicts. I'm not sure how to remove the module though. I then tried the play command on a .wav file. It worked fine, although there was some extra static. I then tried running the same file by double clicking on it in the graphical interface, which then always crashed on attempting to load it, giving signal SIGSEGV. I tried the command play with an .mp3, and after realizing that it didn't support them, tried running xmms from the console. After typing "xmms (filename).mp3" it just brought up the file selection menu. No console error messages. Is the mp3 format not supported my most of linux's audio players?

The console bug is still hitting me. I installed the GNOME desktop enviornment, and the console there works fine. I just keep on getting wierd errors in KDE, namely boxes replacing -'s, and othertimes what looks to be multiple characters drawn over each other.

I didn't get any error messages while installing linux; it's just that my computer's really been acting up lately, and the boot partition is installed on a 5 year old hard drive. I've had to replace several bits of broken down hardware recently, and when I installed Windows XP for this duel boot system, I installed off of a CD rom drive that had died, resulting in eccentric behavior (I didn't realize this until I installed linux; the CDs failed the checksum in that drive, so I installed them from my other, supposedly working drive.)

Whilt

Nah... I have the ac97_codec module too, and I don't have any onboard soundcards. If your onboard soundcard is really being detected, then could you post the contents of your /etc/modules.conf file? Either that, or if you're feeling confidant, you can comment out the bits that you think relate to your onboard card. However, I think that might be only one of the problems. If you open up kcontrol (KDE Control thingy), and open up Sound Server from the Sound section (towards the bottom), you might have a check-box for 'Enable aRts sound server on KDE start[/i]. Check the box and then re-start KDE... cross your fingers. As for XMMS, it may be that MP3 does work (highly likely) but you've got it pointing to the wrong sound drivers/source. We'll look at that later.

The only reason I thought that my onboard soundcard was being detected was because the ac97_codec was installed. If that isn't indicitive of anything, then it probably isn't. Here's my modules.conf file anyway:

alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
alias eth0 3c59x
alias usb-controller usb-uhci
alias char-major-195 NVdriver
alias sound-slot-0 emu10k1
post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || :

Under kcontrol the sound server is set to enable on KDE start, but I did find one other thing of interest. Under the MIDI section of the sound configuation section, I had two sound midi devices listed: first, a device which had a name of (box)(box)B(pi)(box)(box), which very much resembles the corruption I get in terminal, and EMU10K1. The wierd one was my default device, so I changed it to EMU10K1.

I apparently still can't play MIDI files (I think I might have read somewhere that MIDIs weren't supported under Linux with Live cards), but I can run wav files through the console without problems, and through the GUI, so long as I start up xmms first and then load them through it.

Me being a new linux user and redhat 8 user even thou I have used some caldera and redhat 7.3( whoa sorry just happy that the only thing im using windows for now is games the rest of the time im using linux)

But anyways while im using redhat 8, i found and heard that is doesnt have any mp3 support, or should I say come with any. I did some searching around and came across the XMMS site http://www.xmms.org/ which states this, its the second article down. They do have a quick fix for there player which once installed allows you to play mp3's and listen to streamed stations via www.shoutcast.com. Im happy to have mp3's playing now thanks to that download. Now if I could only find a good DVD program to play movies I have.

Thanks for the info painb0x; that did the trick. Mp3s now play normally (at least with xmms.) I reinstalled linux from scratch to try to resolve my other problems, but they still remain. Doesn't look like a corrupt install after all.