Heya

I have been experimenting with Linux for a long while now, and nearing the dawn of Microsoft's new Longhorn due next year, I would like to scrap my long unwilling allegiance with Microsoft and become dependent upon Linux. At the moment we are using Xandros because it has been said to be best for beginners. We've also been experimenting with Fedora Core 2, Suse 9.2 and Solaris 10.

Anyways, my first problem when I installed Xandros on my PC is that it recognises my sound card (Creative 5.1 Sound Blaster Live!), but yet does not seem to produce any sound. Yes, I have checked if the volume settings are on mute! :P

Another problem is installing Gaim. A year ago I had no qualms installing it on Fedora, but it wont work. This is what I did:

-Downlaoded src rpm
-Went into Console and logged in as root
-Changed my directory to /home/miickee as this is where it was downloaded
-Typed 'rpm -Uhv 'filename'.src.rpm', and it came up with:
1. Gaim [###########] 100%

Now, to a Windows user this usually is associated with a completed installation, but apparently not. I can't seem to find Gaim ANYWHERE and I am very doubtfulas to whether it installed or not. If I am doing something wrong please reply and correct me..

miickEe./

Try looking in /usr/bin/ for the gaim executable.

If that doesn't work, try using "find / -name gaim" from a command prompt and see if you can find it that way.

Regards,

Brian

Thanks mate, I tried that but it didn't find anything:
"find: gaim: No such file or directory"

To do the search I did it straight from root, then I changed the directory to /usr/bin and tried searching that.. It didn't find the words Gaim or the actual filename. Does this mean it didn't install, and if it didn't then how would I go about it providing the first time didn't work?

Is there any other explanation for the sound not working on Xandros?

miicKEe./

If you ran "find / -name gaim" it shouldn't matter where you run it from. If it didn't find anything you probably didn't install it completely.

If you query rpm what does it say? On my machine it's:

$ rpm -q gaim
gaim-1.3.1-0.fc3

You might make sure that you grabbed the correct RPM for your distribution of linux and all. GAIM is available through the default apt or synaptic repositories and that may eliminate some errors by installing it that way instead.

As for the sound, some other things you might try is to simply turn up the volume on your speakers a lot further than you might expect. I have to turn the volume up on them much higher in linux than I do in XP. I'm guessing the ALSA driver isn't setting the volume quite correctly.

If you use XMMS try going into preferences and making sure your output is going to the correct driver. I'm not sure which one would be correct for your card. I have a Realtek AC97 chip on my motherboard and the ALSA driver works fine. Finally, if you're testing with XMMS make sure you have the correct plugin for the filetype you're trying to play. It could be that you don't have the MP3 plugin loaded, etc.

You might run dmesg and see if there are any funny messages in your log that pertain to your sound driver. Also, you can check /sbin/lsmod to see if you have all your drivers that you think you have loaded.

Regards,

Brian