How do you go about troubleshooting no sound in KDE? If I go into Control Center-Sound System, select Test Spound, I get nothing, and none of the system notifications play. If I play a DVD, I have sound. If I run alsamixer or kmix, un-mute, turn sound up all the way, I get a faint hiss when the mic input is enabled. It appears the hardware is working, but KDE for some reason can't talk to it.

lspci tells me:

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)

Slackware 11, Toshiba laptop 1415-s173

run a 'ps -ef' and check if any other application is accessing the sound device. [I`ve faced a esound issue with fedora]

if thats the case u can try killing that process and trying again.

do you have line jack sense and ... the other jack sense (can't recall the title) enabled? I usually have to disable those to get the sound working. Once you have disabled them in alsamixer, do the alsactl store and see if that resolves it.

did you enable plug and play ?
most pci and aisa sound cards will not work with out it
you didn't say what kernel you are using
the 2.6.xx kernels have to have ALSD configured
not just in the kernel but also at boot time
and have droped most OSS drivers
another problem you may be having is permisstions on the sound devices
sence udev recreates the sound devices on each boot you may have to set them in
/etc/rc.d/rc.local
the CD and DVD drives connect directly (with wiers)to the sound card so sound
from these don't go through the
normal sound channels that the sounds from apps (like kde) would

plug and play: enabled
Kernel: 2.4.33.3
I don't see any jack sense settings in alsamixer, or kmix
ps -ef does not show any devices using the sound device.

Interesting enough, if I play a video in FireFox from YouTube, I have sound just fine. I get sound from Juk if I play an mp3. AFAICT, it's just the KDE system sounds - applications with sound work fine.

I've had this too.
Solved it by choosing MPlayer as player in Control Centre --> Sound and Multimedia --> System notifications --> Player configuration (might be slightly different words, my KDE speaks Dutch )

Haha, funny you should mention mplayer. I downloaded the source, compiled it, ran it. Next time I went into KDE, the system sounds were working. Too weird....

He probably got scared...

OK with a 2.4.xx kernel your using OSS sound so the alsa tools will not help you

do you have autodect or Open Sound System set in KDEs sound configuration under
the hardware tab ?

by the way
the sound with alsa sounds like a high price stero insted of a cheap boom box
well worth all the work in upgrading the kernel just for this sound
( and it dose tack some work to get alsa working)

Well my problem is kscd works, compiled mplayer video & sound work. But kde sound setting test don't work, xine video works for 20 seconds and freezes and no sound. Noatun & amorak don't work.

It might not be a kde problem. I've tried removing the kde multimedia package and problems persist. I've installed guarddog and looked at the settings, but I don't see where where it might block the sound server (but maybe I'm overlooking some setting). I've got the nvidia driver and have accelerated graphics, but I'm not sure if this could cause a problem. I've tried using the vesa driver, but the problem persists. Any more ideas?

I have yet to get a 2.6.x kernel to work on this box. No network, no sound, sometimes no mouse. But that is another project....

I have just remembered: under a 2.4 kernel in Slackware, I usually had to reinstall Alsa to get it to work. It's pretty easy to do it - go to www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc and choose your soundcard. Then follow the install instructions. Worked for me....