KDE sound problem

[Emon]

Hi all

I am newbie running Slackware10.2 with KDE desktop

I just formatted my HDD, reinstalled slackware & custom compiled the
kernel. Then used the command "alsamixer" to setup the channels, then
stored them with "alsactl store"

I get sound on all applications (xmms, gxine, tvtime) but not the
default KDE system notification sounds (like during login/logout).

So I went to "Control Center" > "Sound & Multimedia" > Sound System

Then under the "General" tab I made sure that "Enabled the Sound System"
check box system was marked.

Then under the "Hardware" tab I made sure that the audio device was ALSA
(I also tried "Auto detect")

Then went to "Control Center" > "Sound & Multimedia" > System Notifications"

In the "Player Settings" at the bottom right hand corner, I marked "Use
the KDE sound system" check box.

All these did not help at all!! but amazingly when I uninstalled the
"kdemultimedia" package, everything was OK!! I was getting KDE system
notification sounds as well as sound on applications.

Reinstalled the "kdemultimedia" package & system notification sound were
gone again.

This is how my settings were (as far as I know), how come it was working
back then but after reinstallation has gone haywire!! I must admit that
I made a much more slim installation this time (omitted quite a few
packages during installation, sometimes even without realizing the
consequence )

Anyway, I don't need the "kdemultimedia" package at all except for the
kmix applet which I keep on my panel (it comes in handy quite often).

So can any one please suggest a solution to my sound problem or an
alternative to kmix applet??

Thanks
Emon

[antidrugue]

Did you make sure "alsa" support is enabled in your custom compiled kernel? And that your sound card driver is present as well?

[Emon]

Hi again everyone

I have solved the problem... this is how it was done. Feel free to trash
this mail now! if you are not interested

(I don't know why, but...) I instinctively thought that the kernel was
to blame, may be because somebody somewhere once told me that alsa can
give problems if compiled as a module. But after recompiling the kernel
several times (with different configuration) & failing to solve the
problem; I suddenly realized that since this was a slim down
installation, why not go into the "applications" directory of slackware
& install everything!! to see if thing work... & sure enough it did.

So I started to uninstall the applications one by one (except for the
ones I needed) & kept checking for sound; I found the culprit to be a
pkg called "flac" (I added the description that came along with this pkg
below)

So... how dumb was it of me to go after the kernel (even though this
kernel was working on the previous installation!!) & then go after the
applications??

Beside could there have been a more sane way to figure this out?? I mean
there was no mention of dependencies (as far as I could see) & there was
no error (again.... as far as I could see ).

OR is this the price I have to pay in *nix world for not knowing
*everything* there is to know about *everything*
Do I have a right to whine about this ??

Thanks for your time
Emon

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC
is similar to MP3, but lossless. "Free" means that the specification of
the stream format is in the public domain, and that neither the FLAC
format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered
by any patent. It also means that the sources for libFLAC and libFLAC++
are available under the LGPL and the sources for flac, metaflac, and the
plugins are available under the GPL. FLAC was developed by Josh Coalson

[bnbohman]

I installed the Flac-devel.i386 and that fixed my sound problem.