Sound stoped working after a a while (FC5, happened to me twice)
 

Ok, I'm definitely a linux newb but I've been reading these forums the last couple days and am getting the hang of some things.

I installed FC5, it detected sound card and played sound. Installed ATI video drivers, Totem... every thing on stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installation_notes.html

Everything is good, I'm watching DVD's and all that wonderfull stuff (listening to them too). I then install skype. Try to talk to a friend and it doesn't work. After that my sound doesn'nt work. So I read and find issues but can't fix my sound. So I do a full re-install of FC5.

It detects and plays sound on install and I do a yum udate of everything i installed. i go through the install of the things mentioned on the above website and when I go to test my realplayer I notice that I no longer have sound.

I have spent a long time reading through this forum and others and don't fully understand what's going on. I hate not understanding. I also hate the fact that I have no sound when I did before.

Can someone please help me out with this?

Thanks

<edit> Yes, i spelled 'stopped' wrong. I hate it when I do that.

What is likely happening is that some application is holding your soundcard for exclusive use. For example, mplayer sometimes hangs when invoked from the Firefox plugin in such a way that keeps exclusive control of the sound.

The way to correct this is to force the termination of these misbehaving applications. For example, for mplayer:

killall mplayer

and if that doesn't work:

killall -9 mplayer

You can do the same for any process. If you don't know the name of the process, you can use:

ps -Afl | grep mplayer | grep -v grep

Replace 'mplayer' with the name of the program you ran, for example skype or totem (they normally use the name in at least part of the process name).

I didn't check that. I have rebooted my computer several times and the programs are defitely not running now and I still have no sound. I'll keep looking.

Thanks

I'd like to note that i did solve this by downloading and building the alsa drivers from source