No help, even after reboot. Additionally, there is no more any popup shortly after session startup telling me "Phonon's VLC backend failed to start", and no string containing phono in .xsession-errors, even after also installing vlc. OK, that is now a bit strange already. Do you have there those phonon env's exported? yesno - can you try to open phonon's kcm and paste results?/can you
On Saturday 05 of October 2013 19:39:00 Felix Miata wrote: try enabling them?
Booting same host gx270 system to 12.3, which has only the 4 standard repos configured, no sound from KDE, and no additional packages required to install previously uninstalled kmix. zypper se -s vlc returns nothing, which begs the question: what exactly is required to have any sound at all in KDE without enabling any optional repos? Apparently something's different between 12.3 and 13.1, because 12.3's only phonon-backend to be found via zypper or yast2 search is (the ancient and obsolete) gstreamer-0_10, and installing it does make KDE4 12.3's sound work. That is due the fact that only gstreamer backend was part of the distro for 12.3. Additionally, vlc itself is also available only since 13.1.
There is also option of installing vlc and vlc-codecs packages. With vlc package alone there should definitely be some sound, otherwise there is something else wrong. Could you check in KMix that default output isn't e.g. dummy or HDMI ? Also would be good if you could try running phonon's sound test (kcmshell4 phonon, 2nd tab).
Also, why doesn't installation of kmix depend on whatever sound support package(s) KDE depends on being installed? IOW, if some phonon-backend is a hard requirement, why is kmix allowed to install if neither phonon-backend has been or is being installed? Technically, no phonon backend is requirement for utilizing KMix, as it can control also other applications/PA/etc. Backends are required, to achieve a functional sound output, only for (KDE) applications that use (lib)phonon, e.g. juk, dragon, amarok, tomahawk, kscd, etc.
Why is it whatever YaST2 depends on to play a test sound successfully isn't sufficient for sound in KDE to work? Put another way, shouldn't YaST2 be using the same method as the DE it's running in? No idea what YaST uses, but it's definitely not phonon, but either alsa directly, or PA.