I have been using xmms for listening to streaming mp3 downloads. Tonight I tried to use it and it won't open. When I try to open a mp3 file with it, or even just click on it to open it, the little hour glass thingie spins around for awhile and nothing happens. It was working and I am not sure why it is busted now.

I am using Mandrake 9.0.

See if you can't open it from a terminal to see if it spits out any errors:

user@localhost: xmms

I had this happen the other day. Open a terminal window and type:

ps -aux | more

see if xmms is a running process even though you don't see it on the display. If it is take note of the process id and do a kill command.

after killing all xmms processes, rm -rf ~/.xmms

I tried to find out if it was still running using "ps -aux | more", it doesn't seem to be running, at least not that I can identify. I tried "rm -rf ~/.xmms", got an "invalid option". Tried just removing xmms from the system and re installing it. That doesn't work either. I am baffled, it used to work. I don't want to have to reinstall Mandrake to fix it.

When I try to open it from a terminal I get this:
[root@localhost fred]# xmms

** WARNING **: snd_mixer_attach: No such file or directory

Not sure if this is the solution but its the first bang on a google search: http://lists.freshrpms.net/pipermail...er/001716.html

And please don't ever condsider reinstalling Linux, that is always a last resort in any case, there are so many ways around instead of reinstalling.

Trickykid that sounds the same as my problem. I tried removing the alsa plugins with no results. I then tried removing other extras for xmms still with no results. I again removed xmms from the system, even went through and removed the empty directories afterward. Then I installed xmms again, starting with just the basic xmms package and one other that I think it needs to work with KDE. That also didn't work.

I checked my SuSE installation and it uses just the basic xmms package and one other plugin for KDE. This must be a problem specific to Mandrake, I ran SuSE for several months and used the xmms player a lot with absolutely no problem. I wish I could fix it.

OK, I have got it working, sort of anyway. I suspect that the alsa plugin might have been the problem and I fixed it when I removed everything and reinstalled it. However now when I click on the xmms entry in the start menu nothing happens, the link to the xmms app is evidently not working. Also when I click on a MP3 file it trys to open with xmms but can't. Same when I right click it and tell it to open with xmms. However I can open it from the "what to do?" sub menu and then drag and drop files to it and they play. It looks like what I need to do is somehow fix the links and I will be back in business.

Thanks all for the help. Some of us would really be up the creek without forums like this. You guys are cool.

If you reinstalled it, yeah, could have placed in a new path. Once that is all cleared up, should be set to go.