Right, I've downloaded a copy of PCLinuxOS and I had the same problem as you had when I tried to play a music file, I could see it playing but no sound, what I had to do was to enable the sound driver. This is what I had to do:

Click on the PC icon in the bottom left hand corner.

Go to More Applications - Configurations - Configure Your Computer, when the window opens, go down to Hardware then click on the Sound Configuration, when the window opens see if there are any drivers indicated in the window, if there are none then try putting a tick in the Enable PulseAudio, it will probably ask to download a driver, agree to it, then when its finished reboot the computer and try the audio again.

You might have to go to the mixer and increase the volume of some of the faders.

Let us know how you get on.

Well jon2, this is a mystery.

Like octal, I've downloaded pclinuxos 2011 and tried to find the cause of your problem, but I have to say, much as I advocate the use of Linux, my experience hasn't been a good one. Trying to run pclinuxos 2011 from the CD on two older machines resulted in constant freezes and lock-ups.

I really wish I could hep you solve this, but after my experience, my gut instinct is to say to you; try another distro. Linux in general is a solid reliable system, but pclinuxos 2011 (for me) has been anything but. The 2009 version incidentally, was fine. Frankly, Linux is now at a point where you shouldn't have to tolerate problems like this and so many other distros now work straight out of the box.

If you want to go down that road, Linux Mint is very good, Open SUSE is fine, Ubuntu 10.10 is OK (avoid for the moment 11.04), all of which offer a reliable system.

However, if you want to pursue this present problem, here (towards the bottom of the page) is a thread where someone else was having the same problem and it seemed to cure itself. He did what octal has already suggested.

This post also gives some insight into problems and a cure for pclinuxos 2011 sound. So clearly there is an issue with pclinuxos 2011 sound. It may be worth looking at the codecs you have available though. In other words, it may not be a "sound driver" problem at all, but a lack of codecs that is causing your problem.

Good luck in solving your problem and if you do get to the bottom of it, please come back and let us all know the answer. It would be invaluable in the PCA archives for others to access.

Glad to know it's solved and the reason behind it.

Thanks for coming back to us.