Since schatoor posted his problem I had upgraded my system to kernel-2.6-test8 and I have to say that alsa is not giving me any trouble at all.I compiled alsa as modules,and noticed that it did not work in my mandy 9.1 system.So,I upgraded my alsa libraries and utils from the alsa website http://alsa-project.org/ and it worked.Initially I was having problems with mixers like aumix,and alsamixer but after the utils/libs upgrade those were solved.As for two sounds at all if a program is locking /dev/dsp you can't have another program with sound.To solve the problem ,the usual workround is work through a deamon like arts(isn't it totally junk) or esd.

He thanks for your feedback. I'm still at test 1 :eek: Didn't have time to do an upgrade. I'l try the latest test kernel soon an compile the alsa bits as as modules. I alraidy upgraded alsa libs and utils.
The thing with arts is that when apps that need to output to the sound card and don't use arts to to that, just sit there for a long time without doing any thing. I have had that problem with xmms, mplayer and quake3 arena. I know xmms and (probably) mplayer have an arts plugin, so I can get around the problem with those, but how to I get quake to use the arts deamon? Or realplayer?

That's why I said arts is junk,I think that you could try esd.
About quake and arts,it appears that you could not use arts with quake,
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-l...-Feb/1883.html
http://archives.mandrakelinux.com/ne...1/msg02295.php
At least it appears that alsa ,quake and arts are incompatible.
So I suggest you to turn off arts (KDE control centre->sound).
As for kernel,test 9 is out today and since I am not in the uni,I would probably have to wait till tuesday to test it.( I have only dialup here,with a meager 11kbps).
Finally,your signature is so interesting but I could not understand a single word of it,
could you explain what does it mean?

Sure, you see i'm an Muslim. It's arabic and it reads;

The is no god except Allah
Muhammad is is the messenger of Allah
Ali, the master of the believers is from Allah

Every muslim beliefs in the correctness of the first two lines. And if a person would say those first lines with conviction, he is considerd an muslim.
The last line is beliefd in by shia muslims only. For them Ali was the rightfull sucsessor of Muhammad

Thanks for the info,
but I thought that Arabic is written backwards(anyway,I'm pretty sure arabic fonts
are not supported in this site).