Hi
I am have real trouble getting sounds to come out of all of my speakers i have a 5.1 surround sound do dah. i have been through the alsa wiki and still no sound but very confused. I am really quite stuck. i would like sound to come out of all the speakers all the time. but to be honest i would right now i would settle for two speakers and the sub. it is driving me up the wall.

Thank you in advance

I too had no sound until the man page for alsa-conf gave the hint about alsa-base... then i did
sudo apt-get intall alsa-base

and lo! it found the sound chip and configured it. then I had to run alsamixer and configure the PCM into the green zone and the PC Speakers bar into the green zone and then I could hear the sounds out of my old Armada 7400 laptop..

Maybe this guy has the answer:
http://www.debiantutorials.org/content/view/161/211/
I had no sound on my amd64 minimal installation, the part about the alsa bug fix by issuing the two amixer unmute commands did it for me.

If your using the onboard sound you might want to check to see if you have a duplicate front then enable it I had to do this with mine to get 5.1.

Thanks for your suggestions thus far but i have tried this already. The problem isn't that i don't have sound. it is that i cannot use 5.1 sound. I can get sound out of the front speakers and by using the 4 channel thing i can get sound out of the rear speakers as well. but i cannot get it to play sound through the centre speaker and the sub

As far as i am aware the 4 channel sound option will only duplicate the sound from the front speakers to the rear. I have been through every option on alsa mixer. and i am quite simply out of ideas. The sound card is not on board. it is a c-media cm8738.

FWIW
http://xinehq.de/

and my ~/.xine/config file has the following lines which seems to say there are a lot of config parameters :
...snip...
# device used for 5.1-channel output# string, default: iec958:AES0=0x6,AES1=0x82,AES2=0x0,AES3=0x2
#audio.device.alsa_passthrough_device:iec958:AES0=0x6,AES1=0x82,AES2=0x0,AES3=0$
# device used for 4-channel output
# string, default: plug:surround40:0
#audio.device.alsa_surround40_devicelug:surround40:0

# device used for 5.1-channel output# string, default: plug:surround51:0
#audio.device.alsa_surround51_devicelug:surround51:0
#audio.device.alsa_surround51_devicelug:surround51:0
# speaker arrangement# { Mono 1.0 Stereo 2.0 Headphones 2.0 Stereo 2.1 Surround 3.0 Surround 4.$
#audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Stereo 2.0


....snip..

and when I was soundless, I stumbled upon soX: http://sox.sourceforge.net

Ed