I have a Sony Vaio with Slackware 10.2 and KDE. Sound works when I'm logged in as root; I tried Noatun, Xine (with AIFF and WAV files, haven't tried video files yet), and RealPlayer 10.0.7.785 Gold.

However, RealPlayer has no sound when used by a user. There's no error message when I try to listen to streaming audio, just a total lack of sound. When I try to open a .rm file on the hard disk, RealPlayer says: "Cannot open the audio device. Another application may be using it."

When I first tried RealPlayer it worked (streaming audio) but I used Noatun thereafter, and after that RealPlayer ceased to emit any sounds in user mode. Did Noatun take over some audio device?

I see this is your first post.Welcome to the Linux Forums.

I had the same problem initially.All you have to do is to increase the volume in your volume settings,not only the option that says volume but there is a separate volume control even for the speaker.

Each user has his/her own settings so you must change the volume settings for yourself.Just go to the Control Center and you will find your option there.Alternatively you can just go and click on the volume button on the panel.If it is not there right click on the panel and add it.

Hope this helps.

I assume you mean the sound level in KDE? Well, the loudspeaker in the panel was at 100 %, and sound worked for other applications. I clicked on the volume control (which I had already put a bit to the right of zero) a few times, but still no sound when RealPlayer did streaming audio. Then, suddenly, streaming audio sound worked, but playing .rm files just produced the device message that I quoted earlier.

The other day I found the solution: I went to the KDE Control Center: Sound & Multimedia: Sound System, and found Auto-suspend. The default there is 60 seconds. So whenever a KDE application has made some sound, the KDE sound system hangs on to the audio hardware for 60 seconds. (I guess that when RealPlayer suddenly started to emit sounds, the 60 second limit had passed.) I put that at 7 seconds, which is probably enough for most purposes. Playing .rm files works as well.

:-)

Volume might be the problem, but it is also possible that there is a permissions issue.

Try ls -l /dev/sound/audio/*. (Your system may vary.) This will show you a list of the audio devices. They appear here as files... with an owner (root), a group, and some permissions ("-rw-r-----" or somesuch). If your userid does not have permission to read/write this device, it can't do sound.

The solution to the problem, if it turns out to be this, has to do with obscurities called "udev." So, first check to see if this is the problem.

loerne@auld:/dev/sound$ ls -l
total 0
crw-rw--w- 1 root audio 14, 4 2006-04-20 22:28 audio
crw-rw--w- 1 root audio 14, 3 2006-04-20 22:28 dsp
crw-rw--w- 1 root audio 14, 0 2006-04-20 22:28 mixer

The audio bit is OK (I think). I made my user account part of the group audio two weeks ago.

Sound works now.