Hi all. I've been trying to get all applications to share the sound card. As you may imagine, the most problematic have been 32-bit applications which are ALSA-agnostic, the most troublesome --and, unfortunately, most useful-- of them being skype. I wrote the following short two-line script, called 'osswrap', to make use of ALSA's OSS emulation: export LD_PRELOAD=$LD_PRELOAD:/usr/lib/libaoss.so exec $@ Although I get errors about about loading '/usr/lib/libaoss', the script works just fine with kopete (so, say, I can listen to my favorite jazz station on amarok while still being able to hear sounds from kopete), but not so well with skype. With skype, it works for the first two seconds, but then I get 'read error, res = -1 , handle = 41' and the incoming --and outgoing-- sound disappears, although I can hear the hangup sound. Here is what I get when I invoke skype and kopete using the above script: gus@presario:~> ~/osswrap skype & [1] 6399 gus@presario:~> ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. read error, res = -1 , handle = 41 <----------|CONVERSATION SOUND DROPS OUT HERE| [1]+ Done ~/osswrap skype gus@presario:~> ~/osswrap kopete & [1] 6464 gus@presario:~> ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. QImage::smoothScale: Image is a null image QDateTime::fromString: Parameter out of range QDateTime::fromString: Parameter out of range QDateTime::fromString: Parameter out of range ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libaoss.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored. [1]+ Done ~/osswrap kopete gus@presario:~> I can't wait for project gizmo (http://www.gizmoproject.com) to deliver on its promises, but until then I have to put up with the closed-source, 32-bit, ALSA-agnostic skype. (Skype for Linux came out in 2004. Why would anybody write an OSS-only application in 2004 is beyond me!) The past few days project gizmo added Fedora support to Debian, so let's hope SuSE support is not too far behind and that their program is 64-bit ALSA compatible!