I just installed Slack 10.0, and all went well. X rocked right out of the box, my harddisk partitioned and multi-boots correctly, all good.

Except my sound.

I have a Realtek AC97 (the scourge of mankind's onboard audio) built on-board that works fine under WinXP. (I know this means nothing to Linux, but it does mean that it isn't dead) "alsamixer" runs correctly and lets me set volume levels, mute, unmute, whatever. No errors. However, trying to play an mp3 with "amp" produces no sound. Trying to play an mp3 (or any sound file) in XMMS under KDE locks up XMMS, and I have to kill it to get it to close.

"alsamixer" reports my card as being a really long name that starts with "Sis". Windows reports a similar name; leading me to think that my card is being detected correctly, but still not working.

I'm using stock everything with the default configs for everything except X. I have no modem or other sound producing hardware.

I'm stuck.

i have the same card. when i ran alsaconfig, it gave me an option of 2 different cards to choose from. did you choose the right card? and have you re-run alsaconfig again?

I assumed I didn't need to run alsaconf because alsamixer seemed to work okay.

I'll run it again and see if I get more than one card, then I'll try both of them. Thanks.

I noticed in your post you didn't mention anything about having installed any kind of codecs/libraries installed; I think that may be the problem. I would recommend installing atleast:

libmad
libao
arts
mpg321 (Something could be wrong with amp)
libid3tag
libvorbis (I know you said only mp3 files, but if I recall correctly I had a problem where this had to be present in order to play some mp3s -- could of just been me though)

All can be found at http://slackware.com/pb/ and I would recommend installing said packages with upgradepkg --install-new to avoid any possible problems arising from possibly existing packages already being installed.

I hope this helps, if it doesn't; please disregard the entire thing.

Running "alsaconf" only yields one soundcard choice. (And the option to probe for ISA chipsets, I don't have one) But after running it, I now two blips of about a half second of sound when I try to play things with amp. The audio is very short, but it is indeed the file I'm trying to play.

I haven't installed any additional packages, but Slack 10 came with a whole boatload of libraries. I do not think this is the problem, but I will check for said packages just in case.

I'm still stuck.

Bump, bump, bump bump it up.

I had a problem configuring this onboard sound chip.
alsaconfig did not write the /etc/asound.state file correctly.
I suggest that you manually check this file.

PS. When you boot, do you see any alsa related error messages?

Thank you for your help, but I've since installed Slack 10.1, and the problem is gone.

Thanks again for you interest in helping me.