no sound !!
 

Hi everyone,
I have a RHEL 4 package for Linux. Recently i copied a few mp3 songs to the under the home directory. Since Helix was giving problems, I downloaded RealPlayer 10 for the same. The problem is that although the song seems 2b playing frm the progress bar, there is no sound ! i have Tech-Com stereo headphones attached to the system...
Please help.
Aditya Joshi.

Has your sound ever worked before with this OS? If so, your sound channel is probably muted. Try using alsamixer or alsaunmute(or something similar) to unmute your volume channels. Note that there is a master channel as well as a headphones channel. If you don't have alsa sound though, these commands won't work. In this case you will need to look at oss sound.

If your sound has never worked before, then you'll need to completely set up your sound card. I would recommend using ALSA, it is the newest sound architecture and supports many newer (as well as older) sound cards. There is a good howto below.

Here are a couple of other threads with similar problems. Take a look at these:
Red Hat/Fedora ALSA mini-HowTo
Red Hat Sound Detection

Some other useful links:
ALSA-Project
Gentoo sound HOW-TO (this should still work for your system)

These links should be able to get you started. Good luck,

~Justin

thanks for the help, justin ! i'll just check out things and get back to you. 1 more question....how do u uninstall software in RHEL 4 ? in windows u do it by going to control panel --> add/remove programs. but what is the procedure like in RHEL 4 ? please help...
aditya

Well, Red Hat uses the Up2Date tool to manage its software, both installation and removal. You can run up2date from the command line to launch the graphical interface or run up2date-nox to use Up2Date in text mode. You can look at the man page (type 'man up2date') and run Up2Date in graphical mode and start playing around.

Did you choose to use RHEL by choice? If so, I would recommend using Fedora instead. Fedora is much more user friendly (especially for those new to Linux) and is completely free.

~Justin

ya actually...i took it up by choice...had appeared for the RHCT examination in mid-February. so made more sense to have it on the system, to get a better feel of things. although i didn't clear the exam, i plan to re-appear once am done with my graduation exams (which should be over by late-June).
1 more thing...u had asked me if sound had ever worked with RHEL before...no it didnt. it only worked while i was installing it on the system. it did play the test sound on the speakers correctly then. it was only later that i added the headphone. it works just fine with windows XP...but i dont know wat the problem is now with linux. Anyway, i'll check out the links that u've sent me by next weekend...have my exams.
Thanks once again... :-)
Aditya.

hi justin, am back again. the sound works just fine with the RHEL 4 now. was a silly mistake i made. ya, the channel was muted, and i only needed to increase the sound to listen to the songs. :-)

here's 1 more question. i copied a few movies to the home directory recently. although RealPlayer 10 claims it can play movie files, it gives me an error saying that the required plugin is not installed. when i go to their site and check it out, it says that my player is up-to-date !! wats wrong ?
is there any better player u would suggest ?

Yes, I would recommend a bunch of different movie players over RealPlayer. Here are a few you might want to take a look at (in order of my preference):

Xine (http://www.xinehq.de/) - Xine is pretty plain looking, so you can use Totem (http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/) for a better user interface

VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)

MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu)

Amarok (http://amarok.kde.org/)

The problem with RealPlayer is that is doesn't support a whole lot of file formats under Linux. You can modify Xine (see this link) to play just about everything, including those Windows files (wma, wmv, etc.). I know that link if for Fedora Core specifically, but the process will be very similar for you.

Good Luck,
~Justin

I had this problem too, so I made a script...
 

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