[CentOS] Flaky desktop audio behavior.

[William L. Maltby]

On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 09:13 -0700, nate wrote:
> William L. Maltby wrote:
> 
> > I feel it might be related to Jim's problem. I feel it might be a bug.
> >
> > Can anybody reproduce? I think the T'bird step is coincidental. I think
> > any sound played as another user should reproduce it. Hmmm ... I might
> > be assuming to much if I assume another user is significant.
> >
> 
> I don't see why the desktop owner would be the only one that can play
> a sound. But in any case have you checked to see if the sound device

I based my presumption based on past behavior (4.2-4.6, 5.0-5.1) and
seeing the logic of why a desktop user might have exclusive use - if
that user is first to use it. Before this, never tried to have another
user use it first.

> is locked by another process? When I have sound issues I usually run
> lsof | grep /dev/dsp to see what, if anything is using the sound card
> and kill it. To me it sounds like thunderbird from the other user is

I'll do that. But in the two cases so far, I had exited the T'bird after
reading the mail and expected that that should remove any locks and
close any open files.

> accessing the sound card directly, perhaps preventing other apps from
> accessing it. Some desktop setups include a sound daemon like esd or
> karts(?), to facilitate multiple things accessing the sound card
> simultaneously, but I'm not sure what their capabilities/limitations
> are as I rarely if ever use them.

I'll check this out too. The sound daemon is available, esound-0.2.36-3,
and I see a config file. I'll start checking the docs, configs, etc. to
see what I can discover.

> 
> nate
> <snip sig stuff>

Thanks for the time and thoughts Nate.

-- 
Bill