Hi,
I'm somewhat of a beginner to using Linux(Redhat 7.3) and I've been having problems with my onboard VIA 823 chipset soundcard with this particular distribution. I have 2 issues with my install and if anyone can provide me with more insight on them, I'd appreciate it.

First, when I use Gnome as my desktop, I can play a sound cd through the default cd player. However, I switch to KDE and launch it's cd player (kscd), things seem to hang and I get no sound what so ever and kscd doesn't seem to respond well. I often get the "KDE Crash Handler" dialog box (causing signal 11)upon using kscd. However, if I launch cdp through a term window, it works fine. So why can I play the cd with one type of desktop's cdplayer and not the other? Is there a better cd player application available for KDE that I should be using that won't crash so much? (besides cdp).

Second, regardless of which desktop shell I'm using, I cannot get any MP3s to play. I have one file that I know works (it did on Windows) and attempting to play it with Gnome by lauching XMMS and pressing play on the selected file causing XMMS to hang. It doesn't even update the track information so I can see that the app is no longer responding.

On KDE, I get the "Can't open audio" dialog box with "Please check that 1) You have the correct output plug selected, 2) No other programs are blocking the sound card, 3) Your sound card is configured properly.

I checked #3 first by running sndconfig under root and it did recognize the correct card but then when it tried to do the "Sound Card Test", I see a segmentation fault error message soon after in the term window from which I started sndconfig.

For #2, XMMS was the only application that I had launched upon logging into my current KDE session so unless some daemon or service is already using my soundcard, I don't think anything else should be keeping it blocked as it is.

Now #1, I went through the XMMS Options, Preferences's Output plugin area. I have 4 plugins available (aRts Driver 0.4, Disk Writer Plugin 1.2.7, eSound Output plugin 1.2.7 and OSS Driver 1.2.7. Of the four, only the OSS Driver one allowed the option under it's Configure to use an audio device other than the default. For this case, I tried selecting /dev/dsp' but none of these produce any sound.

I haven't installed anything additional to the orignal OS installation (that is, I haven't added any new drivers,etc -- just working off the regular install for which I selected to install just about every option and application I could.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Jay