Recently I've been having some issues with sound in Linux. With writing OpenLP in PyQt4, we're using Phonon for audio and video output. However, to get a video to output to 2 displays at the same time, you have to use the GStreamer backend for Phonon.
That's all great, except that installing the GStreamer backend pulled in GStreamer (of course), which then pulled in PulseAudio. And PulseAudio killed my sound.
I could listen to music in Amarok, but then nothing else could produce sound, so no notifications or Youtube when Amarok was running. If Amarok was not running, then I could watch Flash videos and things that had sound. However, that was all I could do. I couldn't watch videos or play music or even just have my notification noises. Then, if I wanted to listen to music, I would have to kill the flash plugin using the kill command, and then I could start up Amarok.
I tried uninstalling PulseAudio and GStreamer, but that didn't solve the problem. Eventually I got so fed up with all of this that I decided to take the plunge and install the new OSS that has just come out. Quite literally, after a few commands and a reboot, my computer's sound was working again!
Well, not completely. Flash and wine still weren't working. Wine was simple to solve, launch the config dialog, and select "OSS" as the output. Flash was not as simple, but after a bit of Googling, I found a post on Ubuntu Forums which solved the problem.
Update: I just remembered that I had to remove ~/.kde/share/config/phonondevicesrc and then Phonon detected my OSS devices properly.
