I had a problem with Firefox - when playing videos, on Youtube and the like, there was no sound.

I did a search here, and found several threads reporting the same problem, but I had to read through a few before I found the solution.

Which is:

Change the driver from OSS to ALSA. In Mandriva this is done through the hardware section of the configuration tool, I guess there are similar things in other distros.

It works for me anyhow - my sound card is an integrated Intel device - ‎82801BA/BAM AC'97.

At last I can enjoy the Large Hadron Rap!

It also fixed a couple of other things - sound previews in the file browser, and erratic performance by XMMS.

You have to restart your computer after making the change.

Hope someone finds this helpful.

I have a related question. I have the same sound problem, and I've found a number of suggies with Google. I tried a number of them, and eventually I completely broke my sound for everything; I have big feet, and it was easy to shoot them

I'm running Ubuntu and no longer get the speaker icon on the task bar. When I go to preferences and try to test my sound, I get messages like this: audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open audio device for playback.

I'm using USB sound because my motherboard sound is broken (hardware problem). This worked correctly under Windows, and I also had sound (except for flash video in Firefox) under Linux and could play MP3s and radio. I've done something stupid, but the HOW-TOs aren't very helpful for several reasons, and I haven't found a good primer or trouble shooting manual.

All suggies are welcome. I hope I can avoid a re-install.

Thanx - Charlie

If you're using PulseAudio, then you would need to install the package called libflashsupport for Flash to work.