I have a slight problem with sound on my laptop. Under KDE, I have no audio capability whatsoever as far as running programs go. However, I can, like, play Frozen Bubble, or some other programs that use ALSA directly vs. aRTs, and that works, along with, like, playing CD's. When KDE starts up, it tells me that aRTs couldn't set my driver to run correctly, so it uses /dev/null. I have jammed all the volumes up all the way in K-Mix and I control the volume with my hardware volume dial. sndconfig doesn't actually pick up my sound card, but I can get it to play the demo sound just fine. Any ideas what the problem is here? Even manally setting in sample rates and bitrates for the audio device don't work, though it makes the aRTs error go away. What do I need to do in order to get full sound under KDE, even if it is only 20KHz 8-bit?

How did you install ALSA?
Try compiling from most recent source.

What sound card do you have?

Just interested because I have arts problems too: if I recompile alsa would it mean replacing the modules or something?

that's exactly what recompiling alsa does. replaces the modules.

RedHat 9 does not have ALSA onboard (I don't know why), but sndconfig does still work. With my IBM Thinkpad's "Crystal Audio Codec" (only one Crystal Audio entry under sndconfig), I have had limited success, with my reported problem at first, to now a complete failure of the audio, short of the mixer, audio CD's, and line in. It still works great under Windows. I've looked at my resource settings under Windows, and they don't match up perfectly, I can't get it dead on. This may be the problem. I'll search other places other than IBM.com (they don't have a thing for Linux, or any audio drivers for my laptop period.) Maybe Crystal Audio might have something.

It seems to be made by Cirrus Logic. That might help.

I have a Crystal-based soundcard. ALSA supports them completely.

go to alsa-project.org, find your soundcard in the matrix, and follow their install instructions. You may need to recompile kernel it the stock one has OSS built in directly... but it's most likely a module, and you'll just have to change some options in your modules.conf.

--Rounan