I am a complete newbie to Linux. The only reason that I switched is because I'm tick at MS and refuse to give them any more of my hard-earned money. So I have installed the first flavor of Linux that I came by, openSUSE 11.1.

I am a gamer so the first thing I did was installed Wine 1.1.9. After I had gotten my first few games up and running, I realized that I had no sound, not just in the games but anywhere on my system. I did hours of hunting and trying different things that I found on the net and finally got sound but the in-game sound was crappy. So, naturally, I did more hunting, more blind tweaking, and successfully killed my sound altogether. More hunting, more tweaking, and I got sound back but the volume is very, very quiet and now some of my games load to a black screen and I don't know how to get out so I wind up doing a hard reboot.

I think I have screwed the pooch pretty good on this one and all I want to know is how to reset the thing back to default first. After that, if someone wants to hold my hand through this that would be great. Getting alsa and pulseaudio back to spec is my first priority though.

As I said before, I am a total newbie. Could someone could please help in a "click THIS, now type THAT" language?

Thanks

If you type "alsamixer" without quotes into the terminal, it should give you a virtual volume control. Make sure that your volume is turned up loudly enough (use the left and right keys to change between different volume adjusters, and up and down to adjust the volume).

As for some games loading with a black screen, please post the device section of your xorg.conf file. You can see the file by typing into the terminal, "gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf" if you are using Gnome or "kate /etc/X11/xorg.conf" if you are using KDE. The device section of the file should look similar to this:

just for clarification, what is a "terminal"?

It's where you can type commands into linux. It is actually called a terminal emulator when it is a window in a GUI (graphical user interface). When you first open it, it should be a blank window with a prompt waiting you, like "[user@machine]:$". The dollar sign typically indicates that you are logged in as a regular user, whereas the pound symbol (#) indicates you are logged in as root.

How do I open one?

BTW: using Gnome

BTW2: thanks for speaking plain english to a dumb ol' Marine like me!

I believe in Gentoo, there is a panel at the top side of the screen, and on the left-hand side it says "Applications". Click on that, and I think the button that opens the terminal will be under a sub-category called something like "Accessories".

Also, thanks for your service as a marine

Where do I find "Gentoo"?

Wasn't fishin for a thanks but your welcome. Was a long time ago and I've "gone native" but y'know what they say "Once a Marine, Always a Marine"

Oh I'm sorry, I got confused what distribution of linux you were using, but it should be the same in yours, opensuse. Just click on the Applications button in the top left, and look under Accessories for the Terminal program.

Gnome Terminal. Found it.

alsamixer was at 60. pushed it up to 100. was only one volume adjuster.

ran gedit. hope this was the info you asked for


Section "Device"
BoardName "GeForce 6200 (0x0221)"
BusID "0:8:0"
Driver "nvidia"
Identifier "Device[0]"
Screen 0
VendorName "NVidia"
EndSection

Yes, that is the correct info. That part looks good, however.

Please type into the terminal, "gedit ~/.wine/config" and look for a line that says and change the Y to an N and save the file.

After that, try running a program under wine that was going to a black screen.

ran "gedit ~/.wine/config"

got a blank page???

hmmm okay, then inside the blank page, just type the single line,
and then save the file and try to run your wine program.

got my system sound back. Thanks!

Tried to run Imperium Galactica II (which ran fine before except for sound glitches) and still got a black screen. Had to reboot.

well, you can try deleting your entire wine configuration by typing "rm -R ~/.wine" into the terminal, and then uninstalling and reinstalling wine, to see if you can get it back to the defaults when it was playing it before.

used "rm -R ~/.wine"

asked me twice if I was sure that I wanted to delete so-n-so file
said y both times

used YaST to uninstall Wine

used YaST to reinstall Wine

reinstalled game

game will not launch at all now

sorry for being a pain