I seem to have no sound at all. Neither KDE system sounds or XMMS will play audio. XMMS will play the song and give no errors, but there is no sound. Everything is plugged in correctly, alsaconf was ran and autodetected my card. Alsamixer was ran and everything was unmuted and turned up. Then alsactl store at command line. XMMS has the correct plugin running. (alsa)

What's weird is, I had Slack 10.2 installed previously on this same computer with the same exact steps as I took this time and sound did work until I upgraded KDE to 3.5.2. This time, I'm still using 3.4.2 on a fresh install and there's no sound at all.

If I look at KInfoCenter under sound it lists my driver (3.8.1a-980706 ALSA v1.0.9b emulation code.) Then the kernel and under kernel it says Config Options: 0. Installed drivers: type 10: Alsa emulation
Card config: Intel ICH5 with AD1980 at 0xfebffa00, irq 3
Audio devices: 0: Intel ICH5 (Duplex)
Synth devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG same for midi devices.
Mixers: 0: Analog Devices AD1980

I'm also using the 2.4.31 kernel that came with slack. Hopefully this is enough information. Any help is much appreciated.

Try recompiling the kernel-with sound support
and try alsa-conf...
or
Try another distro Knoppix has a good hardware support....

I checked around in the kernel config and it does have sound support enabled. I'm using the same exact setup as the last install. All steps, (slack install, all configs, etc) are identical. Sound did work with this setup previously which is why this is so weird.

As far as trying another distribution, I'd much rather stick to Slack and get everything sorted out.

I know this sounds stupid but try the voulume level for the sound system. I know when I first installed slackware 10.2 on my laptop the sound would not work then later on I found out that somewhere I had to actually turn up the volume.

Got it working. Did some googling and did the following steps:

modprobe snd-pcm-oss
modprobe snd-mixer-oss

Then ran alsaconf, alsamixer, and alsactl store once again and it worked.

Good.

Hey how is the sound quality. I was having poor sound quality on mine.

Not the greatest to be honest. I get some crackling and if I turn the volume all the way up in XMMS it just gets worse.

. are you just using OSS for sound? That's pretty out dated, try using alsa instead and see if the quality improves.

regards,
...drkstr

That's exactly what mine was doing. I had slackware 10.2 installed on my dell laptop so I just figured it was my laptop. When I reinstalled windows the sound worked great. And yes I was using alsa.

There are some common problems for poor sound quality in Linux. One of the most common is improper mixer levels set for the hardware. Most of the time, if you just turn up all levels of sound, you will experience distortion. Try turning down the PCM channel (mine is at 23%), or playing with other options as well. I have also heard cases of built in mic's causing distortion on Laptops, try muting that channel to see if it improves.

regards,
...drkstr