I know this is probably a really silly question and I'm REALLY hoping there's a simple answer cos it's driving me crazy so please can anyone help me.

When I startup icewm, I get no sound. Only when I run system-config-sound and "play test sound" that the sound seems to kick in.

I get sound when I load gnome because "enable sound on startup" is ticked on the prefences > sound menu.

Any help please...?

You can start your sound on boot and probably as well when you start the xserver to Icewm. Are your running ALSA?

Thanks, you're a life saver!

I installed/updated the latest alas driver (1.0.7) which now loads the module for my sound card (ESS Maestro 3).

The only problem now is - (and theres always a catch) it mutes everything on startup so I've got to go into volume control and unmute everything!!!
During the make-install process it did warn me that alsa mutes everything by default so the question now is, how do i change the defaults?!?

Does it load on boot already? (if so, one problem solved )
To make it save the mixer settings run this as root:

#alsamixer
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
#alsactl store

Firstly, thanks all for your help!

I'm slowly getting there...

But I'm afraid I was a little too optimistic on my last post. My ESS Maestro 3 module isn't actually loading on startup, just a generic sound module (which is muted anyway). The upside now is that I can run ANY program (eg XMMS) to initialise the ess maestro 3 module.

So what I've been doing (after initialising the ess maestro module) is opening up gnome-volume-control and unmuting things.
Then I'd run alsamixer just to make sure the changes took affect.
I'd run 'alsactl store' which would update the asound.state file.

Only problem now is, when I restart the computer everything goes back to its defaults, including all the changes I made to asound.state.

Any thoughts....?

I don't know if this info helps at all, but I also ran depmod and my current modprobe.conf reads:

# Note: for use under 2.4, changes must also be made to modules.conf!
alias eth0 e100
alias snd-card-0 snd-maestro3
alias usb-controller uhci-hcd
alias ieee1394-controller ohci1394
install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe --first-time --ignore-install sound-slot-0 && { /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :; }
#remove sound-slot-0 { /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || :; } ; /sbin/modprobe -r --first-time --ignore-remove sound-slot-0


and my modules.conf reads:

alias eth0 e100
alias sound-slot-0 maestro3
post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
alias usb-controller usb-uhci
alias ieee1394-controller ohci1394
# Note: for use under 2.6, changes must also be made to modprobe.conf!