Maybe you would mind telling us how you solved the problem so we could
help others who might have the same or similar problem?
[Rosenstrauch, David]
Sure. But it wasn't exactly a problem that I solved per se.
Rather, I was doing something that was stupid, and when I stopped
doing it the problem went away. :-)
The implication
of my last post (i.e., that accessing esd via console players like
mpg123 was working, but that with X apps like xmms, bmp, KDE apps, etc.
was not) was really only part of the picture. I neglected to mention one
important fact, though: I was running all the X apps remotely, via
VNC. Although alsa and oss had no issue with that setup, apparently esd
(or something it was calling - maybe mdnsresponder?) was trying to do some dns
& socket stuff because of my remote X connection (I found this out via
strace). And since we have a very restrictive firewall here, those
dns/socket calls were failing - and consequently the whole esd spawn itself
was failing too, I guess.
I discovered
this because although the mpg123 console player did work when I was ssh'ed
into the box, even that failed when I attempted it in an xterm inside the
VNC connection. Once I sat down in front of the box directly,
and tried everything again, everything worked. Like I said, I was doing
something that was stupid, and when I stopped doing it the problem went
away.
AFA
the actual requirements of what was needed to get ESD working, it was actually
pretty simple. My setup was as follows (though I'm not sure if all of
these pieces are needed, or whether this works similarly in other WM's besides
KDE):
*
load snd_pcm_oss module
*
load an appropriate alsa snd_ module for my card (snd_cs4236, in my
case)
*
install esd
*
DON'T start (or add into DAEMONS line in /etc/rc.conf) the /etc/rc.d/esd
daemon script (No need for esd to be a daemon; it'll launch processes on
the fly as needed, and then shut them down when they're
done)
*
set xmms, bmp, etc. to use the esound plugin
*
set the sound system in KDE to use esound as its output device (instead
of autodetect) (You can do a similar setup in Gnome where you set up its
default media settings.)
That
was pretty much it. After that everything worked like a charm.
XMMS, BMP, Noatun, etc. - as well as the flash player plugin - can all
access the sound system just fine. And since they're using ESD as the
mixer, they can all even access the sound system at the same time (instead of,
say, XMMS reporting that it couldn't access the sound system because arts
had grabbed it) - something that for a long time I was stumped about how to do
in KDE. I've later found out about another way to get around that - you
can use arts as the mixer instead of ESD by installing things like the bmp
arts plugin. But that's a bit more of a pain, since those plugins
need to be installed separately, whereas the esd plugin comes
pre-installed in XMMS and BMP.
HTH,
DR
