hi cliff,
Took some time but finally got OSS working.
I have got xmms and vlc playing alright sound.
But the system sounds have still not come up !
Hope to sort that out and then if anyone is keen shall put up the details of the steps in this thread.
thanks
nishith

I'm glad you had success. To get your system sounds going, there are two ways, that I know of.

First of all, if your hardware supports hardware mixing, then you can use that to play system sounds.

If not, then you need something like arts installed and running to play system sounds. I have used both. You may have arts installed already, if you run KDE. I think there is a sofware mixer for Gnome also, just can't tell you the name of the program.

Arts has its problems, and is not a perfect solution. For example, if you use Audacity for editing sound files, it does not get along with Arts being active at all. You have to turn off the sound server in order to do any work with Audacity. Bit of a pain...

There is a sound server called Jack that you can try. I have fooled around with it, but have not had much success; yet.

Hope this helps.

I am using GNOME so shall get back to the forum with any further progress
thanks once again for all the support
nishith