Hi,
I am running Gentoo linux on a HP DV4000 laptop. I have been having alot of trouble with the sound on it however. The sound works, however, there are problems. I use the snd_intel8x0 module (and some other stuff) which coresponds to my sound card, with alsa, and arts. It will run fine for a few hours, but then it seems like arts will mess up and freeze, so whenever I try to play a sound, like in XMMS, it will act like its going to start, then not, and the time wont even change, and no sound is emmitted, except for an occasional "clicking" type sound. It seems like it does this once or twice daily. artsd does not completely die, as it's process is still running, it just ceases to work. I have to kill artsd and then restart it manually for it to start working again, then a few hours later it will freeze up again. Also if I switch songs rapidly it will quit working and a song will start playing and then a message box pops up from XMMS saying Please check that your sound card is configured properly, you have selected the right output plugin, no other program is blocking the sound card. It will only do this sometimes too, as occassionally I can switch through rapidly and have no problems. Also if I am in firefox and scroll down using the arrow key for a few seconds, the sound will lag out and quit playing, then as soon as i let off the arrow key it will continue playing. If I set the buffer really high in XMMS it will keep playing for longer and I can keep holding the arrow key longer, however, if I set it too high it makes things in XMMS act funny (songs overlapping each other, unresponsive, the little amp bars get REALLY slow response, etc). GKrellM also stops going when I do this, and when I let off the arrow key, it will jump up to the current time and show a level of maximum CPU useage for the last few seconds. What is this about? I am thinking I have something configured incorrectly, as I never had these problems on my old computer, but it also feels like one of those old interrupt problems, though, I don't think it should be doing that. If anybody has any suggestions they would be much appriciated.

Thanks,
Marshall

Forget artsd. It's activated by default in KDE, and it's a mistake. It's better to use alsa directly.

But I don't know how to make alsa play more then one sound at once. Is there a way to do that? The way I have it now, if I set all my stuff to use just alsa, they run over each other and ones using it while the others trying to get to it and screws stuff up.

Learn how to use .asoundrc
A standard one is:

pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmix"
}

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmix"
}