Booted up my shiny new KDE 3.2.3 install this morning to see if the dratted bugs in Eric would go away with the new version. However, on loading, the sound was gone. That is, though every mixer I could find (including all the command-line ones) said that every channel was enabled, there was no sound showing up. The Arts control was even able to show me my music pulsing along happily.

After doing a lot of searching for "KDE sound" (which articles had me doing lots of mod-probing and similar low-level stuff with lots of reboots scattered in there) I thought to search for "KDE 3.2.3 sound". Immediately found an article that, among lots of other problems, mentioned that there are ALSA channels which, when un-muted stop the main channels from producing sound.

I have no clue what these "IEC958" channels are for, but honestly, whatever it is, it's not likely a good idea to have them un-muted by default. Still, the solution was pretty trivial, just start up alsamixer and scroll way over to the right (yes, it scrolls, that's entirely non-obvious, I agree) until you get to the IEC958 channels and hit "m" to mute each of them, (be prepared, the sound is going to turn on right when you do this, and if you've been debugging audio you quite likely have your sound system turned up to 100%... almost gave me a heart attack when it jumped into the middle of some heavy-metal track at full volume on a system that's loud at 1).

Still haven't tested to see if the Eric3 bugs are fixed... I wound up downgrading to KDE 3.2.2 during debugging, so I'll have to re-emerge... and I can't remember if I created binaries for 3.2.3 before downgrading. I'm planning to upgrade to 3.3.0 tonight anyway, so I may just leave it for today.