Sorry for posting this here as well, but I had no luck trying this in the Suse section.

My problem is that I have sound only for my user account on my suse 9.2, but all the other users don't. This is true even if my account isn't even logged in. i have tried to update the sound drivers and made sure every user is member of the audio group, but that doesn't help.

Please, help me solve this (or optionally give me tips on how to explain to my wife why she can't listen to music.)

What kind of an error is given?

There is no error, it's as if there wasn't a sound card at all. Kmixer doesn't find any audio devices.

I expect it's a permissions thing. Is the account that has sound the one that was added by the OS when you installed it? And are the other accounts that don't have sound added manually?
If SuSE behaves the same as Ubuntu then you might need to add your users to the 'audio' group. Do:
and see who the owner and group owner of those devices are (specifically the device that /dev/dsp points to - usually /dev/dsp0 but sometimes just /dev/dsp) and see if it's a group called audio. If it is then as root do:
where myuser is the name of the user you want to have sound. Then log out and log in again as that user (it might not take effect until you log in again - it didn't for me).

ls -l /dev/dsp* returns this (only the first two rows here):

All users are members of audio (except, funnily enough, my user account, which was added by the installer).

That's perplexing. As a quick'n'dirty fix you could try making /dev/dsp0 world read and writable.
chmod a+rw /dev/dsp0
as root

I tried it. Now the device looks like this:
crw-rw-rw- 1 myuser audio 14, 3 2004-10-02 11:38 /dev/dsp0

But still, no sound for the old lady. This is really weird. I even tried to make a new user for her, but it didn't help. My wife's account is a member of user and audio.

I'm stumped. Unless it's something to do with the way artsd is being run? I really don't know. Sorry.

I'm beginning to think that I'm the only one with this problem. Which is kind of weird, since I haven't done anything to mess things up, they pretty far were this way after the installation.

Could my hardware be the problem? Or maybe I should try installing suse 9.3 and wish really, really hard that the problem doesn't follow me there.

EDIT: Thanks for the effort. At least now I know it wasn't just something simple I didn't know about.

I have the same problem with Suse 9.2 as well as 9.3 on the same system. Only root has sound. Users don't have sound. Making users member of audio didn't help.

I suspected the nvidia sound system on the motherboard, but I'm not sure.

I googled for some time and there are more users with the same problem, however I didn't find any solution.(That helped to solve the problem)

The only thing that sounds well is that I found an answer that there was a conflict between the Kmix and the alsa mix, but that doesn't help me either. There was something about disabling kmix?

My Mobo is an Asus a7n8x-x. The system is working fine except..... the user sound!
I wanted to install it on my portable (HP) but the live eval(9.3) had also troubles with the sound, so I took (K)ubuntu that has no troubles at all.
On this system I also have (K)ubuntu and Fedora Core4. They both don't have any trouble with the sound. That suggests it is a Suse problem....

I reinstalled some times but that didn't help. In 9.3 the user has a Kmix symbol in the " system tray" but it has a red mark.
If in Yast2 however I choose sound and do a volume test , i get a fine sound.....

I'm interested if you have the same systemboard or another(nvidia) board?
Do you also have the mixer symbol?
If you go to Yast2 >>>>Hardware >>>> Sound >>>> Volume >>> test Do you get sound ??

CloudBuilder

I have the same kind of problem, it seems. Only that I have one user (besides root) that has sound, others are out of luck.
The soundless user has the kmix symbol with a red mark on the sys tray. And yast's sound test does give sound just fine. My motherboard has nvidia chipset, but I can't remember which one it is.
Getting to be a bit frustrating, since after the initial learning curve, I really like suse.

Ah, maybe I'll just buy myself a 20€ cheapie soundcard.

If it's an issue with kmix do you have another wm to loginto instead of KDE? Blackbox, maybe? If you haven't already, run alsamixer from the CL to set the volume levels and then aumix -L to load them.

The alsa mixer works - I can test it under Yast and the sound is fine.

I get the same information in the console.

aumix -L is not recognized, I also don't see it if I enter apropos alsa.......



But if you try to activate the sounds in the configuration center from kde there is the folowing report :

The proxyconfiguration script is not valid.

This sounds if some kind of script cannot be activated for some reasons.......

Does anyone know which script ???


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to badbunny

About the soundcard : It is Nforce2 AC97
You can see the kind of card in YAST2>>>>>Hardware>>>>>>>sound

Is your card the same?


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CloudBuilder

Yup, that's it. Maybe Suse isn't too happy about that card?