yes, here we go again. I know there have been like a thousand threads about sound problems wit via82xx and ALSA, but this is different. Yes, I've used the search function, but haven't found what I was looking for.

So I have an onboard VIA8233 soundcard, lspci:
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)

The first time I got this thing to work was with mandrake. Now I have Slack and eversince I have trouble. I installed alsa properly, no errors, modprobe does fine, mixer settings ok and above all no sound. A little later I noticed a setting in the KDE control center: 'Threaded Open Sound System' . This worked when I enable the line: /sbin/modprobe via82cxxx_audio in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules, but the problem I have now is that I can only play one sound at a time. If I start let's say mplayer, then amsn won't make any sound until mplayer is done. Then it will play all the sounds it didn play when it had to.
The strange thing is that I know it can play things syncrone, since this works as root (with the threaded open sound system). So know I'd like to know how to set up things so plain users can play it syncrone as well.
(this realy looks like a permission problem, but I can't seem to find it)

Any idea?

thanks,
elluva

Its not a permission problem. Its just the hardware limitation. Your hardware can only handle one sound request at a time. ALSA has ways to mix several sounds together to one device. At ALSA site look for documentation on asoundrc. It will give you different examples what ALSA can do.

You could use arts but it has problems with several programs.

In your runtime scripts you can change the mode to 666 for your sound device. Another way is to add "options snd major=116 device_mode=0666" in rc.modules.

I have no Idea if this is something that happens in software or in hardware, but I know it is possible. As I've said, I can't get alsa to work, somehow it doesn't give any errors (works with my 2.6.0 kernel), mixer settings are ok, but no sound, I don't really need ALSA since I got it to work with the Threaded Open Sound System. The only thing I'd like is to be able to play multiple sounds at once. I know this is possible since I am able to do this as root

tnx anyway!