I've found the perfect DE! Except, I have no sound, and can't figure out how to get it working.

I have Slackware 10.0, have alsa configed for x. Sound works fine in KDE and Gnome. But I have no sound in XFCE. If I click on a sound file, it opens and plays in XMMS but I can't hear anything. My speakers are on, the volume is up, and everything is plugged in correctly.

Next to the clock is a volume bar. Click on the button right next to it and turn up the volumes. You might have to right-click on it and select "properties", then "use internal mixer" before doing that.

Yes, I just found that. I did what you said, still no sound.

When i right-click on the Volume-Control and go to properties, what should be in the command: box? Maybe that is the problem.

Also, the volume control can't be adjusted. I can't increase it, it reads 0%.

I just re-started xfce, and now I have a green bar in my volume, apparently I can adjust it. But still no sound.

run "alsamixer" in the terminal and umute main volume control bar and the one for PCM that should do the trick... actually while your playing your fav tunes on XMMS open up the terminal and run alsamixer...

for some reason unlike KDE, XFCE does not autoload volumes on startup...

Well, it works now. I just rebooted the computer. Just re-starting x did not fix it, but rebooting did. Thanks for the replies!

*shivers* - the windows solution! :}

I'm still having trouble, but I know someone will know what I should do... :-)
If I boot up my computer and go from a terminal into my user acct with XFCE, I have no sound. If I then go into root, startx which is KDE, then logout of KDE and out of root, and log into my user acct with XFCE I have sound.

So to me, it seems KDE is loading the sound for XFCE. Does that seem reasonable? Now, how do I fix it?

KDE fires up the arts daemon to provide its applications
with a common sound interface. You could put the call
to artsd in your /etc/rc.d/rc.local if this is what your xfce
is missing.

/opt/kde/bin/artsd&


Cheers,
Tink

I'm a little surprised that sound in X relies on KDE. What if I hadn't even installed KDE?

Off to try your trick... Thanks Tink!

It doesn't.

But I've set-up my applications to not use
arts. There's alsa (which again may be used
by arts as an intermediate layer), there's esd,
sdl ... all concurrent systems.

But the description of xfce you gave makes
me think that (in your particular case) it relies
on artsd ;)


Cheers,
Tink

Well, I'm afraid that did not work. I typed the exact thing you wrote into my rc.local. When I rebooted, here is what appeared on my screen:
ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:549snd_pcm_hw.start) SNDRV_PCM_10CTL-STASRT failed: Broken pipe.
ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:549snd_pcm_hw.start) SNDRV_PCM_10CTL-STASRT failed: Broken pipe.

Yes, 2 lines of it.

I don't know if this is a clue, but after I logout of x, I always get messages saying :
Warning leaving MCOP dispatches and still 12 (or more) object references alive
ARTS:/Sample Storage, and lots of others with ARTS: something

I have a Creative Audigy card, using Alsa, and emu10k.

At least I found a way to get my sound working, but I wouldn't want to use the process I described above all of the time. And to think, I actually got Neverwinter Nights working on Linux! That is the reason I am tinkering with sound... I want to play!

At which stage in the boot-process, when starting arts?
Add an echo in the rc.local before and after that call ..
like so

echo "Going to start arts!"
/opt/kde/bin/artsd&
echo "After arts"


Cheers,
Tink

I typed in those echo messages, now my screen displays this:
Going to start arts!
After arts.
ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:549snd_pcm_hw.start) SNDRV_PCM_10CTL-STASRT failed: Broken pipe.
ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:549snd_pcm_hw.start) SNDRV_PCM_10CTL-STASRT failed: Broken pipe.

This is pretty much the last thing that prints out on the screen.
? clueless, me?

Hmm ... may be just a timing-problem, and the output
could really be related to the manual start of arts ...

If you don't log into kde, and do an
lsmod
what do you get?

I'm not very good with ALSA, I don't use it here.


Cheers,
Tink