Hi all; been scouring the forums for this one, but nothing's turned up so far.

My problem is this: programs such as GAIM, Jabber, Konqueror and similar aren't playing sounds as they should. Ran kcontrol, told it to start aRts soundserver on startup, and got the following error message:

Sound Server informational message:

Error while initializing the sound driver:

can't start of sound i/o operation

The sound server will continue, using the null output device.

Programs that use OSS directly work fine, but aRts won't play nice, even when I tell it to use OSS. I have definitely RTFM, natch. Tried ALSA, but it didn't like my sound chipset (ESS 1869 onboard). OSS runs it, but only in generic Sound Blaster emulation mode.

Oh yeah, I'm running Mandrake Linux 9.2 on a Compaq Deskpro EN, PIII 450MHz

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

P.S.: messages like "don't use aRts, then" do not fall under the category of "Helpful", so please resist the temptation.

Umm - first check permissions - it seems to be a common problem - give /dev/dsp 666 (anyuser read/write)

Try threaded oss - I seem to remember a small problem with that when I had mandrake on my computer (for a whole 2 days) - also, out of curiosity, try and lsmod as root and if you see snd-blah you have alsa running, so try to get arts to recognize that instead. (permissions important as before, in /dev/sound I believe)



As for alsa - it really is superior, works so much smoother in my opinion - check the link

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...&module=es18xx

Good luck,
Chris

well, I gave your suggestions a whirl, here's the result:

/dev/dsp has 666 permissions already

as for threaded OSS...i tried telling aRts to use threaded OSS, no result...not sure if you meant modifying OSS itself somehow...

tried installing ALSA drivers (1.0.2), packages seemed to compile ok, but when i got to the "modprobe snd-es18xx..." step, I got a bunch of "device not found" errors. any ideas what's going on there?