It depends on your sound card. If you only have one hardware voice, you'll want programs to use ALSA with the 'dmix' device (this will give you software mixing and allow multiple programs to share the sound card). If you have multiple hardware voices, just switching as many thing s to use ALSA as possible would be your best bet.

To properly kill aRTs, open Control Center, and go to Sound & Multimedia->Sound System, and click to disable the sound system. This will effectively stop KDE itself (eg. notifications, KDE apps that use notifications, etc) from making any sound.

Another option might be to just turn down the auto-suspend idle time (which will cause aRTs to release the sound card after a period of inactivity).

Because KDE doesn't really like using anything else. Although you could tell it to use an external app, you'd need to find one that can play an array of multiple formats (from .wav, to .ogg, to .flac, etc), is fast, and can be invoked multiple times at once.

Apparently for ALSA 1.0.9rc2 and higher you don't need to setup dmix. Assuming that's right, you can make XMMS use ALSA from the preferences (output plugin). mplayer might choose ALSA automatically, but you can force it by putting this in ~/.mplayer/config:

ao=alsa

And Firefox has sound? I guess you mean flash.

First of all, I really appreciate all the help guys!

I would guess that my sound card ( ALC850 ) has hardware mixing. It says on the specification page that it has "flexible mixing" anyway. This means that I don't need to / shouldn't specify the dmix device?

Kubuntu comes with an open source-driver for my sound. RealTek provides proprietary sound drivers for my card in Linux. Perhaps I should switch to using their driver? Is it hard to change from the default driver to theirs?

What I have at the moment:

• XMMS was already set to use the ALSA output plugin. I saw it by checking its preferences. Is there a way to be 100% that it's the sound system it actually uses? (I'm paranoid.)

• I have told aRTs to use ALSA. Accrording to your instructions in your post!

• When I start XMMS (no FireFox running) and play an mp3, then start FireFox and go to this game I get no sound in the Flash-game.

• When I start FireFox (no XMMS running) and go to the game I get sound. When I then start XMMS and try to play an mp3 I get a dialog saying: "Please check that: Your sound card is properly configured. You have the correct output plugin selected. No other program is blocking the sound card.".

It works great now! I made FireFox use alsa by installing the alsa-oss and setting FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" in /etc/firefox/firefoxrc. You've really helped me! Big thanks!

I'm sure I'll run into another problem pretty soon though. :-) So far it's going pretty smooth and I'm really liking KDE. I'm documenting everything using Zim (which I recommend you trying, it's not magical but nice) so that I have a structured installation documentation.

Also. What do you all think about using the proprietary sound drivers which RealTek provides for Linux here. Is it possible that I would get better sound output using their driver? Is it hard to change from the default driver to theirs without messing everything up? (I'm on my third install, hopefully my last for a while. )

My sound works at the moment. However I'm not 100% happy with the sound quality, especially when I play loud sounds. It might be as simple as configuring ALSA mixer (I think it's called that anyway. ) though.

If it was simple to try I would do it. But if I risk messing up the system and having possibly another re-installed then it doesn't feel that important anymore.

This is one of my main gripes with linux... it's sound system sucks. Requires too much hacking to get working

It should be more like windows, something provides universal sound stuff and all the apps use it. Not all this chose the right mixer and (try to) configure everything to use it.

This is why you need a good API/Architecture at the start, that way later on you don't have to deal with crap like that.

My current mission is to disable / uninstall the IPV6 module, as the network I'm on uses V4. I'm not there yet, but I've asked for help on the Ubuntu forums. There are already a lot of threads on the forum dealing with this, but the suggestions given are often different and users report locked up systems etc after following advice. So I am tryíng to sort of which method to use.

Next things on my to do list (at the moment) are:

• Check if I should use the properiatey driver for my sound card. And if so, how.

• Make .torrent-files open in KTorrent when I click on them in FireFox.

• Install Thunderbird and restore all my previous mail. (easy)

• I'm using mplayer with its FireFox plugin. It works for almost all files except certain WMV-files, check if that is solvable. I have installed the windows codecs using this advice, some WMV-files do work. It's also annoying that when I've played a file using the mplayer plugin the tab isn't "normal" efter finishing playing the video clip. Which makes All-in-one-gestures not work so I can't close the tab using mouse gestures.

Recompile the kernel. It's not anything big to worry about... it doesn't really affect anything.

If your sound is anything like mine, you actually have two sound devices, one plain old CRAPPY 2.0 (stereo) codec, and one fancy new awesome surround codec, and its the surround one that sounds the best, I have to make sure that everything is using the surround device, especially since it supports multiple stereo hardware voices (yay for hardware mixing \o/).

So make sure you chcek.

Oh, and to explain what I mean by "crappy", the 2.0 codec distorts and sounds really really bad, even at low volume. Its completely unusable, and what you'd expect from onboard sound.

I'd just use kmix and I find 80% or 85% is a good number. I think it depends on your card/chip though. If I put my stereo codec above 50% is sounds even worse

I just have my new laptop with Windows XP (where I do most of my work) and my desktop is Debian Linux where I do most of nothing on lately due to college.

if its just a module, just don't load it then you dont have ipv6 support but yeah, just disable it, make, and make modules_install, and you have no more ipv6 support.

You can install an ftp server and just have it export that dir, or if you already have an ftp server you want to use, and just want to make that path mirror it, there is a file system driver for ftp, but I've never used it. Also, all KDE applications support the ftp:// proto. so any kde editor can open documents on an ftp server.

Maybe a little, the first thing to check is if you have more than one /proc/asound/card0/pcm*p directory.

Check this out:

moose@natasha ~ $ ls /proc/asound/card0/pcm*p
/proc/asound/card0/pcm0p:
info  oss  sub0  sub1  sub2  sub3

/proc/asound/card0/pcm1p:
info  oss  sub0

pcm0p on my card is the surround codec, which sounds very nice, especially since its an integrated sound chip, and pcm1p is the crappy stereo codec that I never use.

The number of subN files in the pcmNp folders is the number of individual hardware stereo devices you can use. And to use one in an app, youd use a device name something like: plughw:0,0,0 (first digit is the card number, if you have only one card, like most normal people, its always 0, second digit is the pcm number, here I have 0, and 1, I only use 0 though, and the third is the subN device, if you don't supply a digit for this one, alsa should just use any available subN device, but I usually make artsd use sub3 all the time, and leave the rest for other things.)

Note that I have a via82xx based sound system, these devices support something called "VIA DXS", which lets the surround codec be used as multiple separate stereo devices. I'm not sure if other sound board support the same sort of thing.

one easy way is to do something like this:

# ifdown eth0
# rmmod ipv6
# ifup eth0
# rm /path/to/modules/ipv6.ko

where ifup and ifdown are your distro's specific network interface scripts (mine is /etc/init.d/net.eth0 stop/start)

oh, I know a sure fire way to get it to disable loading automatically!
First, find your modules alias file (mine happens to be /etc/modules.d/aliases)
make an entry like: alias ipv6 off, update your modules (on gentoo update-modules), and restart (or go the long way and kill your interface, unload the module, and restart the interface).

edit: I really need to not skip parts of posts, I just found this in yours:

Tee hee.