Sound card be occupied by only one program at a time
 

Debian sarge
kernel 2.6.8-2-386

I have installed alsa sound driver. It works fine except that the sound card can be used only by one program, namely the sound streams from different softwares can't be heared simultanously.

While I am listing music using xmms, I can hear nothing else including notify from gaim, and sound from webpages, etc. It seems that the sound card is occupied by those who reach it first, and couldn't be shared.

I have read alsa-sound-mini-howto, but can't find any thread to resolve this problem.

Could someone tell me how can I do?

Thank you.

You need to setup DMIX alsa plugin.

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DMixPlugin

Thank you, Vookimedlo.

I'm sorry that I find this topic has been mentioned before.

And I also find "esound" may be also a solution. It works, though I'm not very clear about the details.

I'm a Linux newbie. These days, the sound system in Linux confuses me a lot.