Sound problem on Linux

Post by **menotume** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 11:57 am

Arrrg, sound stopped working in my Linux client

It WAS working, but now sound/volume shows as 'unavailable' under the options menu. AFAIK, there are no other apps using sound, I have even rebooted and gone right into the client, but still no sound. The only thing that I can remember doing recently was enabling apache and mysqld, but I can't imagine why there would be a conflict there.

I have tried "lsof | grep /dev/audio" to see if anything has it open, but nothing does.

Does anyone know what the client is checking to determine that sound is unavailable?

orchid · Post by **orchid** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 3:24 pm

are you using alsa? if so you need OSS emulation enabled I think, I dont use alsa yet, and my default dev is /dev/dsp

btw, it *should* be able to play sounds from mulitple devices at the same time, bz, xmms etc

what distro/kernel are you using?

Post by **menotume** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 3:51 pm

Ah ha! I found it.

I removed my config file so that all was set back to defaults, and sound was working again.

When I swtch the GUI 'quality' option from high to medium, that's when I lose sound. Perhaps this is a bug in 10.4

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Thx for the help, orchid. I didn't know about alsa, it looks interesting, the alsa site is now bookmarked for reference

Post by **menotume** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 4:08 pm

arrrrrgl!

I take it back, sound is unavailable again. Even doing the same thing (removing the config file) doesn't fix it. And, I guess switching qualiy to medium wasn't the problem either. It's just that when I tried that the first time, that's when I lost sound. But now that it's gone again - it must be something else, something intermittant.

To bzg's question: distro=RH 9.0, kernel=2.4.20, Sound=nForce2 (on the mobo).

Sound works in other apps, just not in BZ. Downgrading to bzflag 10.2 didn't help. "lsof | grep /dev/dsp" doesn't show any other process having the device opened. I'll keep playing

Post by **menotume** » Sun Mar 28, 2004 6:00 pm

Problem solved (twice).
esd was the problem, as well as my ignorance

Fix #1: run bzflag via esddsp, like: "esddsp bzflag". esddsp channels the sound device resources to the specified program. Thank you david_v for that suggestion.

Fix #2: compile bzflag from source instead of using the rpm binary. I guess that compiles esd support into the client. Thank you ben_l for that idea.