CentOS - Jul 2008 - Flaky desktop audio behavior.

Might have some kind of bug here. I want to know if anybody else is
seeing this. It's happened twice now, so I should be able to repeat it.

$ rpm -q centos-release
centos-release-5-2.el5.centos

On my desktop, I "su -" to another user. Then "nohup
thunderbird", it
gets the mail and plays the announcement. ISTM this is an error right
off the bat as this user is not the desktop owner. But that's not the
main point. I really am OK with that behavior in my instance.

The problem is that the sound system goes muted, as indicated by the
volume control on my desktop panel and I can't recover from it except by
a reboot.

When I try to open the sound control panel, I get an error panel saying
"No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found". If I just
try to un-mute, there's no error message but the status does not change.

I've attached a snapshot of the error panel.

Further, in chasing another problem that Jim (hce) had, we have done
this:

# find . -type f -exec echo {} \; -exec cat {} \; >/tmp/asound.play.bug

Normally it acts as expected but now I get this.

cat: ./acpi/event: Device or resource busy
cat: ./sys/net/ipv6/route/flush: Operation not permitted
cat: ./sys/net/ipv4/route/flush: Operation not permitted
cat: ./sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register: Invalid argument
cat: ./sysrq-trigger: Invalid argument

and it hangs right there. <Ctl>-<C> breaks OK.

I feel it might be related to Jim's problem. I feel it might be a bug.

Can anybody reproduce? I think the T'bird step is coincidental. I think
any sound played as another user should reproduce it. Hmmm ... I might
be assuming to much if I assume another user is significant.

TIA
-- 
Bill
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William L. Maltby wrote:
> I feel it might be related to Jim's problem. I feel it might be a bug.
>
> Can anybody reproduce? I think the T'bird step is coincidental. I think
> any sound played as another user should reproduce it. Hmmm ... I might
> be assuming to much if I assume another user is significant.
>
I don't see why the desktop owner would be the only one that can play
a sound. But in any case have you checked to see if the sound device
is locked by another process? When I have sound issues I usually run
lsof | grep /dev/dsp to see what, if anything is using the sound card
and kill it. To me it sounds like thunderbird from the other user is
accessing the sound card directly, perhaps preventing other apps from
accessing it. Some desktop setups include a sound daemon like esd or
karts(?), to facilitate multiple things accessing the sound card
simultaneously, but I'm not sure what their capabilities/limitations
are as I rarely if ever use them.

nate