I have just upgraded to Suse 10.2. The new system works fine with the exception of sound.

I have no sound at all. KMix appears with a red cross through it and opening it shows no mixer controls and a drop down menu with nothing on it. Launching Amarok produces an error message along the lines of "Xine was unable to initiate any audio drivers" Other programs which use sound advise that no sound is available.

However if I log in as root then everything works as it should which suggests to me that my normal User does not have the right permissions to access the audio files drivers etc and that this is why nothing works.

The sound system was working previously under Suse 10.1.

Is this likely to be the case and how can I resolve the problem

Thanks for any assistance

Robin

Have you tried the Control Center controls to see if you can get it working?

Control Center - Sound & Multimedia - Sound System.

to see permissions on your sound devices run
#ls -l /dev/dsp
#ls -l /dev/mixer
#ls -l /dev/midi

also run alsamixer and check if there are 00 (zeros) somewhere.

finally check irq assignment for your sound card:
#lspci -vv

obviously next time you could say something about your sound card

Thanks for the help

The problem was that the user wasn't part of the audio group and got rid of the 00 in alsamixer, having corrected that I now have sound although for some reason only out of the two front speakers not the rear center or side speakers, any suggestions of how to solve that would be appreciated

My audio card is a Creative Soundblaster Audigy SE

I had the same problem (no sound for users) and appreciate the solution PaleViper. I would never have suspected that the normal users would have been denied audio in a normal installation.

For those who are not familiar working their way around SUSE, to do this in YaST, select: Security and Users --> User Management. Select the user and click Edit. Click on the Details tab. Click on the Audio group. Click Accept and then Finish.

I have successfully installed 10.2 onto my laptop and everything works fine except that although the sound card is found and identified as (sis962) AC'97, yast is unable to configure it. It says the kernel module could not be loaded.

I have tried using alsaconf, which locates the card and appears to be successful, but in fact it is not.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I have same problem. No sound. There was no sound in 10.0 either. My user account wasn't in the audio -group. But it is. No sound. YaST gives this kind of information:

82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller
Configured as sound card number 0
Driver snd-hda-intel

Machine thinks that sound is coming, but I don't hear anything. This is little bit annoying.

Search the forum for "82801G" (if you haven't already), since there may be something unexpected regarding setting up or detecting that hardware. Also try logging in as root and see if things change. Another more drastic measure would be to delete the sound card profile from the machine, reboot, and see if it does a better job detecting and installing it this time. (I think I had that work once on SUSE 10.0. I do not know to this day what the real problem was, since I never had a problem like that on another machine.)