I've been trying to get a distribution working in an old pc that i got from a garage sale at my university. I tried Suse - it was sort of too easy. For debian i couldn't get X to work. finally i settled down on slackware. It boots up fine.
The thing is that if i am logged in as root I can increase /decrese my sound volume and access my windows partition. But when i am logged in as a normal user I cannot access my windows partition ( I solved this) and I can play songs but I am not able to hear any sound. I did this in KDE.
I prefer GNOME. Currently I have Gnome 2.6. I logged in as root and played songs in xmms. I couldn't hear anything. So i clicked on the volume icon at the right top corner and incresed it. But as soon as my mouse left the slider the volume automatically decreased to zero. Its really getting frustrating because I can only use KDE ( I like using GNOME, Blackbox, wmaker) and I have to be logged in as root.
also how do you acces the volume controls in blackbox and wmaker?
thank you

You can access the volume everywhere using alsamixer (run it from a terminal).
Try adding your user to the audio group so you have access to the output and mixer files.

To add your user open /etc/group file and search for a line like this: audio::17:root and make it look like audio::17:root,youruser

the volume slider going down immmediately also happens when there is no card or the card module is not loaded

this, to me would indicate that the user has no priveliges to access the sound card or the mixer....
try some chmodding of /dev/dsp

That sounds like it would be the problem, and that would work, but ole' Pat would smack you for it :P

The proper fix (as stated above) would be to add the user to the audto group

eh?
I see no prob with it but whatever...
and anyway.. I"ve modified my install of slack to the point where it's not really ole' pat's anymore..