I am interested to find out how many people actually have sound on their Linux boxes. (using any distro) By "working" I mean, no delay, and works with everything. (ut2003, XMMS, Mplayer, Xine, KDE sound server....) If you did get it working, how many hours/days did it take to get it working. And finally, what sound system are you using? ALSA, OSS, ....

I've got a slight, occasional hum in the left speaker that I can hear during silent or nearly silent parts of tracks (with my music there aren't many of those) - dunno if it's hardware or software. Using ALSA and I got it going the day I installed this version - not right away because alsamixer didn't work (or I didn't work it) the first time but changing the settings with rexima did the trick. I don't game but ogg123, mpg321, xmms, mplayer, and so on run most all the time. Only thing that requires anything weird is ogg123 which requires a '-d oss' switch to work. I'd rate my audio maybe an 8 out of 10.

My sound has worked ever since I installed my sound blaster card. Never had any luck with the on board sound on my OEM i810 mainboard.
Sound always works great in KDE, is kinda iffy with Gnome.
It has worked with Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, Knoppix.
Since I timed the card install to an upgrade install, I spent no time on it, it auto detected and worked.
I did waste time fooling with the on board sound.

My sound works fine with everything.. Slackware

It took me right around 15 minutes to get working the first time.. heh

I had to install the alsa drivers from CVS to get all the bells and whistles on my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card going, but front speakers worked right off the bat in all of the automatic config distros I have used.

On-board stinks and is to noisy for anyone with decent hearing. They put it right next to the CPU, for GNUs sake!

Mine works.

On which machine...

Laptop, sound worked after initial install with Slackware 9.0

Main desktop machine, dont know how long it took but after install, however long it took me to uncomment one line in rc.modules and then chmod 666 /dev/dsp* /dev/mixer*

Other machine with an old SoundBlaster having to use isapnp which is the biggest pain to get going.. probably took me about 15 minutes.

I have 2 mobos with on-board AC97, and each one works perfectly with all distros I've tried (see my sig), using Alsa.

I was just curious, because I think for me, getting the sound setup properly is the most frustrating thing. I think because I sit in front of the computer ALL day, EVERY day, I have to have some sort of entertainment!!! I could not get ALSA setup properly, so I went to OSS. I know that ALSA is supposed to be the "latest and greatest" for Linux sound, but I have yet to see that. Maybe it is just my hardware? Too new? For me, I want to have GOOD sound for desktop, music, games, and video coming out of my speakers or through headphones. (All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!) I could not get ALSA to meet all of these needs. I guess I have to wait and keep trying new releases, or maybe not since OSS works fine.

One thing that frustrates me in the Linux user's world is:
If something doesn't work, then we either:
a. Don't use it.
b. Try to get it to work.
If we do get it working, then we either think:
a. It was difficult to setup and took hours/days.
b. It was "easy!"
We think it was "easy" because:
a. Now that we know how to setup our OWN machines, we know what to do, so you should too!

I don't think that the sound setup is easy and am waiting for the day that it will be. Of course when I installed SuSE 9.0, YaST correctly identified my Audigy2, as well as onboard Asustek sound card, and the sound (ALSA) worked, but only for some applications. I had KDE desktop sounds, but could not hear anything out of XMMS or ut2003. That's no good for me. Ho humm.....

P4 3GHz Hyperthread
800 MHz Front Side Bus
1GB Corsair PC3500 RAM
2x Seagate SCSI 40GB drives
Asus P4C800 Deluxe Motherboard
Audigy2 Platinum
Nvidia Quadro 900XGL
Sony SDM-X202 21 inch monitor
Sony DVD RW DRU-510A
Hauppauge PVR-250
Klipsch THX 2.1 Speaker System

turtle beach santa cruz here, too, and it has worked without a hitch in suse, redhat, mandrake, and slackware. maybe someday i'll get around to setting up ALSA, but then again, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

I installed redhat and booted up system put the cd in drive and rock n roll...
Thou as someone sead when i listen to music i can't hear if someting is wrong....

Integrated CMedia audio worked out-of-the-box with RH9 and sounds better than it did under WinXP.

Have you thought about trying the 2.6 kernel? I have had amazing results with OSS and 2.6 on my Inspiron Laptop and a different CMedia integrated board. All said and done for 3 computers I spent about an hour configuring everything.

I have installed a Sound Blaster Audigy LS that works with windows but RH 9.0 sees it but can't figure out what to do and neither can I. It's a nice system if anyone can tell me what to do I would be grateful .

Asus A7N8X-x
Amd Athlonxp 2500+ Barton core
1 gig samsund ram
ATI 9000 video
Sound Blaster Audigy LS

RH 9.0

system's sound great, but sometimes need to restart xmms to work on mp3 files. i know the problem is the mp3 player plugin i used, but can't find better plugin.

0 second to configure. My Redhat 9 detected and configured the sound card automatically. I use sound blaster, Audigy sound card.