KDE-Forum.org

I have two identical motherboards, two indentical Slackware/KDE installs, but I'm having some new audio issues on the second motherboard.

This second computer is my HTPC frontend. Sound is very finicky on it. The machine dual boots between Windows XP and Linux. Sound has been fine on the XP boot, so much so that I've actually bought 5.1 speakers for it. But sound in linux has been a nightmare.

On boot, there appears to be no sound some of the time (even if I add my user to the audio group). If I run (as root) alsaconf, and then alsamixer, sound appears to work, but only from the front speakers. If I attempt to change the volume in alsamixer, the sound goes dead and I need to kill all sound apps, and redo the alsaconf as root again.

If instead (sometimes) I play with mute, instead of volume, sound comes through 5 of the 6 speakers. It's bizzare. It screams out "driver issue" to me, but on my other computer with the same kernel, motherboard, and Slackware install, (but 2.0 speakers) sound works relatively well.

I'd appreciate some help on this. It's the one thing keeping me from pimping my MythTV HTPC to all my friends.

Thanks for your time!

Just to clarify, I'm using hda-intel for sound, and I honestly don't care about proper 5.1 sound at the moment. I just want consistent sound and not dead speakers!

OK, thanks, I'll give the ALSA folks a try.