Bah, I didn't like the "new" make xconfig when it came out (and I couldn't get into the make gconfig) so I moved back to make menuconfig w/o even running X. It works happily for me. make oldconfig rocks too, when I don't want to hunt for necessary new stuff on every new kernel update.

So, how do I check whether I have the aRTs server running? I wouldn't have thought I had it installed w/o having KDE installed?

I'm not at a slack system currently... But I believe arts is located in the 'l' package which contains a large number of gnome/kde libraries and you may have some from that package.

will tell you if the arts server is running.

Uninstall arts. With arts installed, mpg321 believes there's a KDE enviroment, when there really is none. I had this same problem too.

But seriously, you don't lose anything but not using KDE or Gnome, save a couple dozen megs of RAM.

As for breaking dependencies, NEVER NEVER NEVER use non-official packages that someone else compiled! It's just not worth it! A few hours of machine time compiling a huge package is definitely cheaper than the hours of aggravation you'll have finding out this 3rd-party binary is oh-so-fragile. The official Slackware packages are fairly good with dependencies (the only non-crucial libs Pat compiles to are to provide security features, which I wouldn't argue with).

Well, that was pretty weird. I followed n0xvb's directions. No arts stuff was running. I tried to run mpg321 and grep for arts. No arts stuff was running.

I did find out that arts-1.5.3 was installed, so I took kuitang's advice and uninstalled it. I ran mpg321 and it ran just fine! Weird. There was no arts daemon running at all, but when I tried to run mpg321, it... I don't know... ran an invisible instance of it.

Thanks guys! And thanks for the advice of what does and does not work w/o KDE and Gnome installed.