I'm looking for a way to play my laptop's sound over my desktop. I am running KDE on both and thought I would try something through Artsd but I started getting error messages (sigsegv). Pulse Audio looks like it might interfere with a lot of things.

if you just want MP3s or individual files... you can look up:
UPnP server - MediaTomb, MythTV, etc. - Will stream individual files over the network upon request from the client. (you run a server on the other machine)

OR

XMMS2 - Xmms2 has a kind of audio server that can be streamed to and controlled by xmms2 clients... I don't know what technology it uses though.


You could just plug an audio cable between the two... you can't control it with the receiving computer (other than volume)... but you can play it through the speakers there.

Other - I'm sure somebody has developed some sort of client controlled server somewhere for what you want... I haven't bothered to look.... maybe any one of the audio management daemons out there will do it... Jacked seems popular but probably has the same issues as Pulse Audio.

vlc might get you somewhere