Original von Amoeba
Make your way over to the file ~/.kde/share/config/knotifyrc and make sure this is present
[code:1][StartProgress]
Arts Init=true
KNotify Init=true
Use Arts=true
[/code:1]
Set them to true if any are set to false.... You will probably need to restart kde.
Egads! Thank you! It works! I've been trying to solve this problem for some time via search-engine thrashing. Excuse me while I spout out phrases that might help others find this solution:
no system notifications not working sound works system notification startup sound problems
*polite cough* At any rate, it quite perplexed me. artsd worked fine... occasionally I would get "/dev/dsp can't be opened (Resource temporarily unavailable)" messages after clearing /tmp in an attmp to get things working, but that was a false lead. For some time, my problem was the default setting of the mixer for new accounts was zero. The root account, which was created by the installation distro (Knoppix, which I then dist-upgrade to Debian unstable) was working fine-- new accounts, created by the command line or with Kuser, weren't part of the audio group... so to make sound work completely, I did this:
* ensure all users were in the "audio" group
* inside the user's account, go into Kmix and turn up the appropriate volumes-- for me, there were two sliders that needed raising. At this point, normal audio, such as playing music, worked fine.
* then edit /home/(user)/.kde/share/config/knotifyrc as Amoeba so kindly explains.
And then system notifications work. Cute, aren't they ^..^ I hope this helps somebody.
I'm running kde-core 3.3.0.