I have just installed a Fedora rpm xmms package (rpm) onto a Redhad Enterprise 4 OS. and when i run the standard version of gaim that comes with RH and XMMS together I loose sound on gaim, untill i close xmms then all the sounds played come through in order....

You set XMMS to use the raw sound device as its output (OSS or ALSA). This means that when you run XMMS it will grab the soundcard to itself and will not let any other sounds through.

If you want to play sounds from many programs then you have to use a sound server like arts or esound.

Ah! That may possibly explain the no sound issue I had some time ago.

I apprently have Arts on my machine due to KDE doest hat mean that it will only run in the KDE enviroment?

if not then it's not working somehow because i looked at the plugins for output in XMMS and i found the OSS driver 1.2.2 and something about re-writing. But i didn't find anything to do with arts.

I had the same problem a while back and had to do the same thing to fix it KS.

You can download the arts output plugin from the XMMS homepage and there are esound plugins available too.

No, you don't have to run KDE to use the arts daemon.