Re: Newbie Qs: Minimize? Sound? Desktop Areas?

[Ian Peters <itp gnu org>]

On Tue, Mar 09, 1999 at 05:11:16PM -0800, Randy Wilkinson wrote:
> I can only get X sound apps to work if I disable Gnome sound support.  I want 
> to use X11amp, xplaymidi, etc.  Does the sound app have to be Gnome aware 
> or compliant to work with Gnome's sound enabled?

GNOME uses a sound daemon which handles sound requests, mixes them,
and is the only application to handle playing them, so that multiple
apps can play sound at once.  This is not true if every application
grabs /dev/dsp to play sounds, like non-GNOME programs do.  There is,
however, a way to get some (most?) non-GNOME applications to play
nicely with GNOME --- start them with esddsp, like so:

foo@bar:~$ esddsp x11amp &

This will catch the calls to open /dev/dsp and pass them through the
sound server.  This will work with many but not all non-GNOME programs
that use sound.  I believe this will work with x11amp as long as it's
not suid.  I don't know about xplaymidi.

-- 
Ian Peters		"The farther you go, the less you know."
itp@gnu.org				-- Lao Tsu, "Tao Te Ching"