see added comments..

I've read little bits o' info here & there about using 'oss' as the sound driver instead of ALSA. That's all-well-and-good advice except I can't seem to get it to work. RTCW I've hit the '~' key which brings down the console. I've then typed "set s_driver oss", kinda like this link which describes a similar ordeal for DoomIII. But it didn't work. Maybe there's something else I have to type. Maybe it depends on being root or non-root. Maybe my system doesn't have OSS support. Maybe my onboard ALC855 codec isn't good enough to use OSS. Maybe it's muted somewhere and hard to locate. I tried going into the control panel thingie in KDE to the "sound system" area. It was originally set to 'automatic'. I tried changing it to 'open sound system' but it looked like it crashed (gave an error). I set it to 'Advanced Linux Sound Architecture' which didn't crash but sound via ID based games doens't work. I tried nuking arts from a command line. I did a 'ps -ef|grep arts' command and then kill -9'd all arts related processes. Still nothing. Enemy Territory same Quake III demo same I tried Anyone else have any ideas? Is there a bunch of libraries or something that I have to have installed for OSS to work? I'll go install a UT2kX demo and verify that *some* sound works (I know last time I installed Debian on this pc I played UTx nicely for hours so it's a good test to make sure sound works via ALSA). Debian kernel 2.6.8-2-686-smp, KDE 3.3 ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256MB with 3d enabled with ATI's latest 8.20.8 drivers (glxgears gives me I think 9600fps) MSI 865PE Neo-2 Platinum integrated Realtek ALC655 5.1 audio -- 2 channel headphones Pentium4 2.8C 2x512 MB Kingston HyperX 19" NEC FE991FB CRT other stuff...

added comments:
At first I thought it was working. Nope. Nothing audible. aRts volume manager though has a nice bouncy graph when I try to play a Beetles song...

I wonder if my sound is configured right. Here is the output from lsmod:
beeblequix@debian:/usr/local/games/wolfenstein$ lsmod
Module Size Used by
nls_cp437 5920 1
isofs 37948 1
fglrx 440320 7
ipv6 281764 12
af_packet 23976 2
floppy 62608 0
pcspkr 3884 0
rtc 14184 0
i810_audio 39860 0
ac97_codec 19212 1 i810_audio
joydev 10240 0
usbhid 32768 0
uhci_hcd 34096 0
shpchp 102860 0
pciehp 99756 0
pci_hotplug 35708 2 shpchp,pciehp
intel_agp 23072 0
intel_mch_agp 10832 1
agpgart 35436 3 intel_agp,intel_mch_agp
r8169 18404 0
snd_intel8x0 37452 2
snd_ac97_codec 70884 1 snd_intel8x0
snd_pcm 102948 3 snd_intel8x0
snd_timer 27492 1 snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc 12008 2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm
gameport 5120 1 snd_intel8x0
snd_mpu401_uart 8640 1 snd_intel8x0
snd_rawmidi 26084 1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_device 8456 1 snd_rawmidi
snd 59620 9 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_timer,sn d_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device
soundcore 10816 2 i810_audio,snd
ehci_hcd 33188 0
usbcore 122116 5 usbhid,uhci_hcd,ehci_hcd
tsdev 7616 0
mousedev 10736 2
evdev 9824 0
capability 4744 0
commoncap 7552 1 capability
psmouse 20616 0
ide_cd 43232 1
cdrom 41148 1 ide_cd
ext3 129704 1
jbd 70584 1 ext3
mbcache 10340 1 ext3
ide_generic 1632 0
piix 13824 1
ide_disk 19648 3
ide_core 142556 4 ide_cd,ide_generic,piix,ide_disk
sd_mod 22144 0
ata_piix 8388 0
libata 42116 1 ata_piix
scsi_mod 127972 2 sd_mod,libata
unix 31156 467
font 8544 0
vesafb 6880 0
cfbcopyarea 4096 1 vesafb
cfbimgblt 3264 1 vesafb
cfbfillrect 4000 1 vesafb

So then I need help setting up my audio subsystem. Ideas?

hehe.

hehehe.

heh.

Here's why I'm funny: everything was muted. :|

Clicked the K-kicker thingie --> multimedia --> volume control. Sucks that all the settings *START* muted. *mutters to self*

I unmuted a number of things. As soon as I increased the volume on PCM from 0% (!) to, well, something above that I started hearing music.

testing games...

nothing yet on games

more help for Quake3 based games: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-83028.html more more help (claims to fix Quake III)... http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-77217.html and here's one for RTCW: http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/wolf/ aaaand here's one for ET: http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/et/ buuuut they both point here: http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux...x.html#nosound

a relevant link:
http://happypenguin.org/forums/viewt...ighlight=sound

anyone know what these errors mean? I actually ran it from a root terminal, then from normal user (terminal). No difference.


------- sound initialization -------
/dev/dsp: Input/output error
Could not mmap /dev/dsp
------------------------------------
Sound memory manager started
Sys_LoadDll(/root/.wolf/main/ui.mp.i386.so)...
Sys_LoadDll(/root/.wolf/main/ui.mp.i386.so) failed:
"/root/.wolf/main/ui.mp.i386.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

The device /dev/dsp is probably busy, usually its locked by arts. One way to fix this is to set file permissions on the artswrapper script to 4711 and then configure the kde sound system to release the audio device after a short delay, I usually set this to 5 seconds, the default is 60 seconds. This should solve all sound contention problems for all games. (It works for me, YMMV)

HTH

Mad.

1)what do you mean to set permissions on artswrapper to 4711? do you mean locate the thing and 'chmod' it (seems the numbers don't look right)?

2)kde sound system -- I tried a number of things there. I disabled it (unchecked 'Enable Sound System') and rebooted & it didn't work. I tried lowering some setting to ~10 seconds and it didn't work. Explain a little more plz. Am I in the ballpark?

3)i've tried killing arts entirely. shouldn't that have released /dev/dsp?

4)if I use GNOME (or is it GNOME2?) or another window manager would I still have the same problem?

5)is there a command that I can execute to see which process owns a device? Something like 'ps -ef|grep /dev/dsp' ? (wonder if that would work...)

1, artswrapper is a script that is used to control the arts daemon, its permissions should be as follows (the location of this script is distro dependent)
with those pemissions any user on the system can suspend the arts sound system.

2, Goto (on kde 3.4) Control Center / Sound & Multimedia / Sound System and set the "Auto-suspend if idle" slider to 5 seconds or a similar setting.

With both these settings in place kde will auto suspend arts and release the sound devices after the specified timeout.

3, dont know I've never had to kill arts

4, dont know I dont use gnome

5, lsof should be able to pinpoint what is holding the device
where PID = the process id of artsd, should list everything arts has open

HTH

Mad.

good stuff. thx a bunch. I'll post back with results.

ß

ALSA and OSS are two methods to achieve the same thing ie sound output from a soundcard. Arts & ESD are two methods to achieve the same thing ie sound management.
Sound management is just letting lots of applications all use the same sound card at the same time (mixing). Some cards like the SoundBlaster range make this MUCH easier by having onboard hardware mixing.
OSS uses a time hounoured method of treating sound just like any other file and passing it either in to or out of a processor (ADC/DAC) to make or capture sound. These files are all /dev/* files like /dev/dsp /dev/mix or /dev/adsp.
ALSA uses some other magic to do the same job but is a bit of a closed book to me.
OSS was never deprecated out of linux but did run in to some licence issues as the firm that own it, although offering it FoC to all users are able to sell it for real money to companies. Hence most distro now come with ALSA which is a shame as most applications were written to work with OSS.
ALSA does a reasonable job of pretending to be OSS through the OSS emulation libraries which intercept all calls to /dev/dsp etc.
As your error reports a problem mapping /dev/dsp and you are using ALSA it's a fair bet you do not have a /dev/dsp so it's reasonable to guess that your ALSA installation is imcomplete.

Either go get real OSS from www.opensound.com or get the best ALSA for your hardware from www.alsa-project.org

FWIW I'd go for OSS

ET Script

Modify the paths as necessary for RTCW...Quake, I can't help you with, since I don't play it.

Hi guys, I'm having a problem that looks like the problem on this thread.
I'm having problems with wine 0.9.3. It don't play any sound. Media player says that there is no soundcard. I have a thread about this. Can you guys that a look at it too?
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=397738