first, this may be more appropriate to be posted in software, cause it's not a hardware problem, but since you probably will know how the software works around with the sound cards i hope you can help me. i'm running KDE 3.1.1 on a S.u.S.E. 8.2. the sound is aok...that's what i though...but the system can play only one sound at a time...i mean that for example when i launch XMMS and am listening to music and then i decide to use licq when i receive msgs there's no sound notification from licq...but the music is playing just fine...and when i switch off xmms it works fine...but that's just an example of how only one sound stream can be processed at one time, which is really not normal...how do i fix this? i really have no experience in sound servers
i will appreciate any kind of help! thank you very much in advance!!!

Not sure if this is a problem with SuSE or a feature, it could also be the sound card. Wether I use redhat, mandrake, suse, slackware, debian, knoppix..
All of which I've tried and used for a while.
My sound card is limit to 1 channel of operation, while in windows it'll play .. a ton of sounds at the same time as I've found..

Tried everything I could think of and never got it to allow more than one sound at a time.

**Update**
Found after a couple of searches that this has been discussed before and you should have checked the old posts before asking

It seems alsa is causing the single sound at a time settings, and switching to oss makes multiple sounds possible.
Since suse is based on the alsa drivers...

Oh well. I can't switch to oss cause my sound wont work at all then, but you could give it a try?

I've been using the alsa drivers for a while now and havn't experienced this problem, Im currently using version .96 of the alsa drivers, I assume that the oss compatibility modules are also loaded, that could be a problem but afaik if those arent loaded kde would not play any sounds.