Hi,

Is there a way (other than rebooting) to clear the lock a program has on a resource if the program abnormally terminates?

From time to time, xine will crap out on me and when it does, it keeps its hold on my sound output device (/dev/dsp). At this point, I cannot re-launch xine or launch any application that uses sound without rebooting (just leaving the GUI and going back in via startx is not enough).

Since xine's crashing seems to be pretty regular unless all you do is watch a DVD with your hands completely off the keyboard and mouse and sit about 8 feet away from the monitor, re-booting is getting to be cumbersome. A quicker way to release all the resources that xine had would be great for me aside from getting xine to stop crashing.

Thanks.

Hi,

The 'fuser' command is the one which tells you what programs are holding what files. Since in Linux every resource is represented by a file, as you have seen, this should therefore tell you what if anything is holding the sound device. You will probably find /dev/dsp is a symlink, so use ls -l to see where it points, then do eg:

fuser -vu /dev/dsp0

and see what that says - you will get the name and PID of any process holding the file.

If there is no such process, this could be a bug in the kernel where the device is not resetting itsself. RedHat 9 uses the old OSS drivers by default, so you may want to experiment with ALSA.

Hope that was informative,

TIM

Xine may still have processes running in the background. You could enter 'killall -9 xine' to kill these processes. This works for me after Civilization bombs on me occassionally. I use 'killall -9 civctp' and the sound returns.

Thanks avarus and jschiwal for the useful suggestions.

I'll try them both. I've been thinking about experimenting with ALSA, so maybe this woudl be a good reason to try. It's just that now that I have everything pretty much working and fairly stable, I hate to mess it all up - but I will anyway.

Thanks again.