Re: Crashy crashy

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows brown edu>]

On Tue, Mar 30, 1999 at 10:48:27AM -0600, Jamin Philip Gray was heard to say:
> 
> >   Does "all sound" include non-dsp sources (like CDs and MIDI?)
> > 
> 
> No.  I should have been more specific.  I can play CDs just
> fine...I've never had problems with that. 
> 

  In that case, I can think of three things that could be happening (in order
of likelihood):

  - esound is holding on to your sound card but for some reason isn't playing
   Gnome sound.  You said you killed various processes but I don't remember
   whether this was one of them: try "killall esd" and see if it helps
   (in which case the question becomes, why is esd killing Gnome's sound)

     (note that for most non-Gnome programs you have to disable esound before
      starting them with "esdctl off" and reenable it afterwards with
      "esdctl on"; you can also start esd with "esd -as 5" to make it only
      hold onto /dev/dsp for 5 seconds)

  - (unlikely) your sound driver is somehow getting confused by esd and
   refusing to play sound.  The only way I can think of to test this is to
   rmmod and re-insmod it when the sound breaks, but I think this will only
   be able to show that the problem _is_ the driver, not that it isn't.  (if
   it _does_ work, the problem is probably the driver; if it doesn't, I can
   still imagine that the sound driver is at fault. (eg, sometimes X screws
   up my text-mode display to the point where none of my video-manipulation
   tools can restore it)

  - (even less likely) A problem I had at one point (on older kernels?) was
   that sometimes processes would open /dev/dsp and then terminate but somehow
   leave it open (I never worked out exactly what caused this, although I
   suspect kill -9 was the culprit).  This hasn't happened to me recently
   though, I think it got fixed.

  Daniel

-- 
  "People would panic?"
  "Very briefly, I'm afraid."

     -- The dangers of colliding with a star examined;
           Terry Pratchett, _The Light Fantasic_