I installed mepis recently, and when I play sounds with arts...it's full of static. I tried playing an mp3 in xmms with the arts plugin...still...lots of static....I tried xmms with the ALSA plugin, and no static. Why would this happen with arts? I prefer arts over any other sound system...and this is the first time this has ever happened to me with ANY linux distro.

If you are having the problem I think you are having, its an easy fix. open kmix, click the switches tab and disable the iec958 option. If kmix is not your default mixer, any mixer such as alsamixer has this option. I have only run into this problem with suse, fc2-3 and mandrake. In all the debian distros I have, it is disabled by default. Mepis is my second linux distro and I don't have this problem but I use OSS. I know there is a startup script somewhere on the suse forums to make sure it is disabled but I switched to debian so I dont need it.

helios