Version:           3.5.2 (using KDE 3.5.2, Debian Package 4:3.5.2-2+b1 (testing/unstable))
Compiler:          Target: i486-linux-gnu
OS:                Linux (i686) release 2.6.14-arandas-1.1.0

Hi all

The sound server doesn't work. After load the windows manager it pops up a message 'Sound server fatal error, cpu overload, aborting'. Then KNotify crashes. The problem is both on the root and the default users.

I was looking around for this message and found a lot of references about this.
For example, I found the following on http://www.arts-project.org/doc/handbook/faq.html:

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13.3 What is wrong in the driver if I get the cpu overload problem?

Usually, artsd uses select() to find out when to write new data. Then, it uses an ioctl(...GETOSPACE...) to find out how much data to write. Finally, it writes this data.

A problem occurs if artsd is woken up either always or if there are minimal amounts of data to write. The OSS documentation specifies that select() only wakes up a process if there is at least one fragment to write. However, if artsd is woken up if there isn't data to write, or very little, for instance one sample, then it will keep writing little pieces of audio data, which can be very costly, and eventually overload the cpu.

To fix this, the driver should wake up artsd only if there is a full fragment to write. 
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Unfortunately I'm new in linux world and cannot understand how (or where) to apply these kind of instructions.

This is an example, I'm not quite sure that these solution is the right one for my problem, but I don't know what else to look in order to solve the problem.

Can anyone help?

Thanks