I think you are talking about Red Hat 9. The inbuilt xmms won't play MP3. Just download the latest xmms RPM from *www.xmms.org and it will start playing.
But if you are using RH9, its pretty old now. 3 more versions have come after that. So better upgrade. PCQ Linux 2005 is coming in March. Its based on Fedora Core 3 (Red Hat 12) So buy the mag and install it. Their cutomisation is good.
