[CentOS] Flaky desktop audio behavior.

Wed Jul 9 20:32:29 UTC 2008
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

William L. Maltby wrote:

> CD is playing alright. Volume Control Panel mute, volume, balance all
> work. In *my* original thread (not the one from ech - Jim?), I couldn't
> even open the Volume Cont... crap that's too long - VCP  ;-) (you know
> who you are!)

I'm not sure it's a bug though, it may be a feature(tm) (the changing
of permissions on devices). I don't think it should work that way.

I checked my Debian Etch desktop at home for any devices that were
owned by my userid and the only ones that came up were terminal
devices(/dev/pts/ stuff), which is normal if your logged in. It appears
Debian hasn't adopted the stuff that changes the ownership of /dev
devices and instead relies upon group access rights(what I think is
the right way to do it). So any user in the audio group for example
has a right to play audio. I don't have any RHEL or CentOS desktops,
I have a Fedora 8 desktop in VMWare ESX but it doesn't appear to
provide a virtual sound device so I can't check anything there either.
My servers get a minimal version of gnome, not enough to login to a
desktop with but enough to run some gnome or gtk related apps over
a SSH tunnel.

>  2) When the using application(s) are terminated, the devices ownership
> should be returned to root, as with tty devices, or back to the desktop
> user (if that user ever owned them *before* the devices were used -
> which they weren't in this case) allowing later allocation to another
> user again and making them also available for the desktop user.

While this may be possible I can imagine the logic getting confusing
if there are multiple people that are logged in.

>     The Q now is will changing ownership of these affect the volume
> slider? Shouldn't? First one is an LSB shared object, second one is
> data.

No neither of these should impact volume. What impacts volumes with
regards to flash is if the plugin is actually loaded(which requires
going to a page that has a flash object), and actually plays some
audio. Before that happens nothing with the audio subsystem is
touched as far as I know..

> Before I write a bug report (after seeing that one doesn't exist),
> anything else you think I could look for or try?

Not off the top of my head.. I guess last words would be don't be
surprised if it doesn't get fixed(short of getting off the scheme
of changing ownership of dev devices entirely for things like audio),
which I don't think(hope) would happen until a major OS rev is
issued.

nate