If I were to put an estimate on the worst implemtation within linux I'd have to conclude it is sound. Nothing seems to be more troublesome and bother me more than sound.

I run a computer repair shop. I spend a great deal of time with linux on various pieces of hardware, promoting linux, and using it myself. I spend a great deal of time studying as well. It is a decent OS on good hardware (although a bit unstable on older (solid) hardware). During my last year or so with linux I have found that it has some problems with sound, sometimes the issues are easy other times they are hard, sometimes they are the software developers, other times KDE, and other times the drivers themselves.

On one of my machines I can't get sound output from the speaker out port, instead I have to plug my speaker cord into the mic to get sound output. In FC1 that's the way it is on my one motherboard (a brand new P4 system). In FC2 it is fixed. (FC2 has other bugs and various problems so I am not upgrading to it yet.) Nonetheless, the problem exists and existed that way for about a year. On another box the sound won't initialize every time (no errors), and I have to use the "Soundcard Detection" in order to get it to play the test sound pattern before I can get sound in games. During a game the sound will just stop playing. Other times it will stop playing when I exit the game (and upon re-entry) the game won't play sounds.

If I use aRts the sound gets messed up while playing videos with programs such as gxine/xine. If I turn aRts off it plays the movie have sounds, but no (event) sounds can be heard in programs such as KDE. If I turn it on then I get sounds in KDE but no movie audio.

The list goes on. Linux seem to be very unstable when it comes to sound. I have ALSA installed and I keep it up to date. It isn't possible to uninstall aRts without uninstalling other features in linux. As far as I know aRts only supports 2 voices. Alsa supposedly supports more.

What troubles me is that this is 10 years into the OS and sound card technology has pretty much become standardized (with some exceptions) and these sorts of sound problems should not exist today.

I have a total of 8 machines running linux on various motherboards but the primary ones are running nforce 2 based chipsets. One of them is an Asus p4 board with a completely different chipset and I have similar problems on all of them. The P4 board is the one that won't output sound except to the mic (LoL which is supposed to be an input).

For some reason one day the mixer just stopped showing up and I couldn't get it to launch even from the terminal window. It isn't that sound is a big deal for me. I do like to listen to music and watch videos and play games, but I can do without it for most things. But sometimes it is a must to have, for instance, in games such as Enemy-Territory.

So, my question really focuses on the issue where sound just stops or needs to be re-initialized (I guess this what is happening when I do the sound card detection from the system settings menu off the FC menu). I can always get the sound back by doing that and/or sometimes by rebooting. It wouldn't seem so bad if it didn't happen on multiple motherboards, along with the variety of other things happening, as well, on various systems.

Anyway, any idea on how I can ensure that I get sounds all the time in games, in the desktop, in movies, from the right sound port, etc?

TIA,

Jim

From my short experience with Linux (about 3 years now), all I can say is: "Whatever is inbuilt on the main board is not good", period.

I run currently 5 different machines, with _all_ of them, I got some sort of problem with onboard device:

Intel Desktop Board D850EMv2 would cause random kernel panics... Reason? The Inbuilt network card causes the problem.. Solution? Install a cheap Lynx Ethernet card and disabled the inbuilt one from the BIOS.

AMD Duron 800 MHZ has an inbuilt sound card too, the problem is quite similar to yours: aRts sucks, ALSA sucks. Period. There's no real solution for this besides wasting a great deal of time re-compiling the kernel and ALSA. Solution: I bought a cheap Zoltrix Sound card which fixed the problem.

Linux really does not like onboard stuff. Another thing that should have been addressed long ago is winmodems. That surely is a big frontier for anyone who wants to try Linux and cannot connect to the net because of a cheap crap modem.

And that's a big deal actually. If I have a computer where I've to replace modem, sound card, scanner and printer, it is way cheaper to buy WinXP home for like 99 bucks, and does a nice job, be you a gamer, a developer or an occasional user.

All I can recommend you is a cheap sound card like mine and good luck!