I've tried posting this elsewhere, but so far I've only been ripped into for using Slackware, than any useful advice.. must be just the group I've been going to. Anyhow, I'm running Slackware 9.1, and have been using it for like.. a week so I don't know my way around it yet.

In every game that I've played since installing Slack, any event sound in any game (Vendetta Wolfenstein, kbattleship), gunfire, turbo, doors opening, mousing over buttons, hitting opponent, etc are all delayed by about a half-second. I've tried adjusting audio buffer size, preventing the sound server from going on standby, but anything that uses aRTs as the output (using KDE, so it's the default) causes the lag, heck even XMMS is slow. I tried switching to ALSA as the sound I/O method, but I get an error stating

sound server informational message
error while initialising the sound driver
device: default can't be opened for playback (Permission denied)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device

Sorry to post this here, but I've just been unlucky with other people. If yall feel it isn't vendetta-fied enough to help on, I'll understand. Thanks for a great game, that plays fine for me on other distros (except Mandrake, but that's another thread)

Actually, that's an arts problem. Arts by itself delays sound (it's an extra layer, ya know?), and there's an option to delay it more. Look around in your arts control panel for anything with "ms" or milliseconds as the unit and make it very small. If worst comes to worst, try doing a "/set snd_mixahead 0.75" in Vendetta and see if that helps.

Setting the delay lower causes sound to crackle, and fuzz on me. I tried the solutions listed in a previous thread, as well as setting the mixahead in vendetta, and while shortening the delay in vendetta to almost playable levels, everything else still has the same lag. Any idea how to convince KDE to not use arts, and switch to alsa? The posted error message came up when I tried to specify which sound system KDE should use, rather than the autodetect default.

I did some more checking, and it seems ALSA isn't available to any application in KDE, giving messages that the device isn't available for use, and I'm just flat stuck as how to get the required device available. I'll try out a few other window managers, but probably have same luck.

Go to your kde control thingy, then go to 'sound system' then uncheck ¨start aRts soundserver on KDE startup¨ that should fix it (if not: first logoff and login into kde...)

aRts is something never to run (unless you want every fricken' thing in your desktop to give sound). Set xmms to either oss or esd output, and use mpg123 or (esd)play for the output of your sound events in kde if you want.

Sheean is correct, although I reccommend setting the output device in XMMS to ALSA instead of OSS.

Well, I've run into a few problems with switching over to ALSA... even after following Sheean's advice, ALSA still isn't available for playback, only OSS, which completely confuses me, as I thought I was using ALSA with OSS emulation.

I'm in the process of compiling the 2.6.0 kernel, and even though I can't convince the nvidia drivers to compile for it (I suspect because my kernel is in $HOME rather than where it expects it to be) I can still use it to get ALSA running. I hope. Then I can fight with the drivers, and hopefully join yall back in the game.

You need the 2.6.0 patch to compile nvidia kernels. It's on my other machine, but I might be able to get it to you come morning.

http://www.sh.nu/download/nvidia/linux-2.6/

Hmm, I seem to be facing an odd problem.. I've been using XMMS to test out the audio. I had to write in the OSS emulation, since the appropriate modules didn't come up in the config... I did this to be safe, as I understand not everything is ALSA-compatible yet (including Vendetta?). I've tried specifying the ALSA output plugin for XMMS, and it gives me that can't open audio message. When I use the OSS plugin, it plays fine.

I've started a download of the nvidia driver that Froste posted, and will try to get that installed. The 2.6 kernel seems to be giving me no problems, and is running rather smoothly, so I think I'll keep it... just this blasted ALSA! Maybe I should get the current RC2 from ALSA's website, since I'm currently using the 0.9.8 version. Anyhow, thanks so far, but I'm off to bed. I love being able to tell my computers to shut down in a couple hours.

Yeah, I tried to get alsa too.. made my system very unstable.. removed alsa >:(

You can't "get" alsa from the site. It's built into the kernel. Mine's 1.0.0.something. And everything is alsa-compliant if you compile in the "OSS Emulation Layer". I used to keep OSS around as modules, but now I'm 100% ALSA.

I suspect I should get the 1.0.0RC2 of ALSA, but my slapt-get repository only has the 0.9.8 there, so I'll have to compile from source, recompile... fun.

Oh, with the nvidia driver, the errorlog says that I haven't compiled in loadable module support, but in menuconfig, I know I selected it. Odd, I wonder if I need to manually edit the .config file.

Did you compile v3 or v4? I think you need v4...