Installed 11.3 with KDE, actually it is working good with 512MB RAM. But there is not loud, but annoying noise, coming from speakers, some electronic noise. No such sound in XP.
… is there any chance the noise is coming from either the nominal mic or from the USB mic (a webcam mic ? ) and that you simply need to switch those off ?
noise.mp3 Yes, I can switch it off, no help. Despite it on or off, when unmuting Mic Boost, sound is intensifying. Looks like ALSA is not perfectly working in this case
Don’t know how to manage with it. The sound is not from microphone, it is from HDD, keyboard, mouse. The same in Ubuntu 10.04, Mandriva 2010S Gnome. In Puppy 5.1 sound only from mouse, from HDD it is absent there What’s interesting - I booted Suse 10.1 live cd, there is no such problem there lol! You may say “ah, you probably didn’t have sound there at all”, but it was, kdetv showed tv better than novadays tvtime So probably it would be great to use 10.1, but no support for it now :\ Was googling a bit hard drive noise speakers linux - Google Paie but no good answers.
As noted, if you find another distro such as puppy works, then run the same script on that distro (ie run it on puppy ) ! Compare the differences ! You know the script I mean:
/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh
run that on Puppy and on openSUSE and compare the two. That may give you a hint as to what puppy are doing to make the difference.
In freenode I asked ALSA people about this, they told that ~90% questions there are about ALSA configuration, but this thing they think is kernel issue. Then asked kernel people, but didn’t get wise answer. Installed FreeBSD with Gnome, no such noise there, is working nicely, but Logitech webcam and Leadtek TV card aren’t working there , Linux is better - both are working Dunno, will try probably Dreamlinux and Opensuse 11.4 Milestone 1, newer kernel. I’m not sure how and where to explain this bug to kernel developers, maybe this is feature Anyway, thanks for patient answers about Linux in general bug.
Now it’s okay, no such sound anymore. 11.3 with XFCE. There were some gstreamer, pulseaudio updates, I didn’t pay attention after which it dissappeared. So again I can use Opensuse without annoying noises
So probably it would be great to use 10.1, but no support for it now :\ Was googling a bit 
Anyway, thanks for patient answers about Linux in general bug.