If I log into the root user my sound works perfecly, if I log in as an user I get nothing. I have looked at other threads about this issue but I find the directions way too confusing to follow. I am posting in newbie because I want some newbish and easy directions to follow. If im on user and I go into the sound preferences and I choose ALSA instead of Autodetect I get an error when I click on test that says "audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open resource for writing." I have did alsa configure and I can here the test sounds just fine but I get nothing while im not logged in as root. I have looked at alsamixer and all of the sliders are up to max. I do not know what chmod means or how to edit the groups file. Please help, thanks.

Try these permissions

chmod 666 /dev/mixer
chmod 666 /dev/mixer0
chmod 666 /dev/dsp
chmod 666 /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa
chmod -R 666 /dev/snd
chmod -R 666 /dev/sound

hth

i just spent 15 minutes trying to figure why i was going trough the same thing...

the sound is working afterall, there was simply no sounds configured to play automatically upon login

try to open an mp3 in amarok