i just recently installed red hat everything seems to be working fine when i go into systems settings to do a sound card detection it works and detects my sound card. but when i'm trying to play a cd or even a game or just basically anything to do with sound nothing happens "no sound" i'm new to this so please inform me if i'm missing a step or if there is something i need to do to fix this problem. thank you

You might find that all of your volumes are at zero or muted. Check your mixer settings.

If you are trying to play an audio CD, make sure that you have the ausio cable connected from the CD drive to the sound card.

simple, crude test:

find a .wav file (find . -namw \*\.wav)
cat wav_file >/dev/dsp

if cat works, but no sound do as 3Dave says.

i have two operating systems "not a dual boot" but on two seperate swap bays one with win2003 the other with red hat 9. cd's and anyhting related to sound work in win2003. in red hat i noticed that one game offers sound but the rest don't the sound card detection works it plays some acoustical music. but when i play a cd or anything else with sound games on the os or something from the internet i get no sound. i have checked the sound mixer nothing is on mute is undelected and the volume is raised. i will double check my cables i will also do further reserch to see if anything else works. i'm kinda new to linux but, figured i need to learn so, i fyou have any other ideals on just how to trouble shoot in general let me know thanks

FYI windoze treats audio CDs differently to GNU/Linux as in it uses te CPU to process the sound and plays it like a WAV file (using up resources!) but under linux you need to have the audio cable connected inside your PC. Looking inside at your CD drive you should have a power cable, a ribbon IDE cable AND a thin (usually grey or black) cable going from your drive stright into your soundcard (or onto the motherboard if your soundcard is intergrated).