I've been using Linux as my main OS for almost 2 years now and I am still having little troubles with the sound device. Playing some Rock under XMMS works fine. I click stop for whatever reason. Go back to press play again and it gives me the message about the sound card being configured properly, make sure no other program is using sound.. ect. Is there a command to find out what is using the sound device? Or one to clear up the sound device? Thanks in advance.

I forgot to mention I'm running Fedora Core 1 with all the YUM/Up-2-Date updates installed. Using onboard nForce2 sound.

Are you using KDE? Specifically arts? I've never really used it but I understand that it's utter crap. To find out whether arts is running do a ps -A| grep arts. I think it should come up as "artsd". To find out which process is using your sound card (assuming you're using OSS and not ALSA) you can do a fuser -m /dev/dsp. This will give you a process identity number which you'll have to match to the output of ps -A to find out the name of the process.

Once you're definetly sure which process is using your dsp you can then kill it with kill -s 15 <pid> or killall -s 15 <process name>. It that doesn't do it (ie process is still running) then change the "15" to a "9". Once the offending process has been killed, try XMMS again. If it works you'll have to look into disabling that particular process on startup.

Not only KDE, but also gnome and some other wms use "sound servers". You can make xmms use those sound servers by using the appropriate output plug-in. Have a look at http://www.xmms.org/plugins.php?category=output

I am using Gnome and generally use OSS. The ' fuser -m /dev/dsp ' command does not work giving me an error. What do I need to have installed in order to use that? And the
' ps -A| grep arts ' command comes up with nothing. It just hangs the console. Also under XMMS I have the output as OSS driver 1.2.10. I saw you two are both using Debian. Would Debian be a good switch for me? I've used Mandrake in the past and didn't like it. Fedora Core 1 has treated me mostly well. But I have also read to stay away from these distros because they will only give me trouble.

I think gnome uses the esd sound daemon. XMMS -> Preferences -> Audio I/O Plugins -> eSound Output Plugin should solve your Problem (if esd is running properly). It seems that this Plugin is included into the original xmms tarball and should be available with no further packages to be installed.

Arts is the sound daemon of KDE and should not run if you don't use KDE.

There are lot's of discussions on LQ which distro is "the best". I can say that the package management of debian is very good and that "stable" is very stable. The software in stable is a bit outdated but by using backports / the debian extra cd or other "unofficial" repositories you can install newer versions of programs. Or you could use "testing". The number of broken packages is much less than the word "testing" suggests. Unlike other distros debian will ask you a lot about how things should be handled during installation / administration and many things must be configured "by hand" / on the command-line.

What shedir said.
What error?
Well it should come up with nothing since you're using gnome but the fact that it hangs the console is troubling. Try doing it again with a process you know will be running (eg ps -A|grep X should bring up XFree86) and see what happens.
Try the esd plugin as shedir suggested and see where that gets you. If it solves your problem then you're laughing.
I wouldn't bother switching if sound is your only problem. If you have other concerns then it's never a bad idea to go exploring. Fedora has apt-get by default now so I can't say that the package management is that much better but there are more packages easily obtainable though debian. They're also more standardised if you stick to the official mirrors.

[remus@localhost remus]$ ps -A|grep X
5314 ? 00:01:25 X

[remus@localhost remus]$ fuser -m /dev/dsp
bash: fuser: command not found

The ESD plugin has given me no problems so far. And I think I found the problem with the OSS plugin not working correctly. After I would exit UT2004 it wouldn't clean itself up so I would have to kill the process to open up the sound device again.

Thanks for all the help, it is much appreciated.

No worries. Glad we could help. Post back if any similar problems develop. As for fuser it's part of the debian base system so I thought it would be part of Fedora too. Apparently not. Double check as root to see if it's there (maybe it's there but not in your user's PATH). You can also do a man fuser. If it's installed the manpage will come up. If you don't have it maybe there's an rpm somewhere out there. It's worth having as it's quite useful.