Hi,

I'm having sound issue. They're not unsolvable - they just keep recurring: "/dev/dsp is busy" - or similar. ARGH. Restart PC.

I'm no expert when it comes to sound in linux, it seems to me that some programs selfishly 'grab' the sound card - making it inaccessible to others. Clsoe the program often doesn't seem to help.

If I start up my PC, flash/quake4 both work flawlessly. However, if I play music, close the music program, then start quake4 or Flash (say, on youtube), the sound doesn't work.

I've tried switching off ESD. I've tried 'killall esd', 'killall artsd'. 'lsof | grep /dev/dsp' gives me nothing. Does anyone have any useful suggestions?

I use Ubuntu and I'm sure my alsa is set up for hardware sound mixing. I guess - in theory - if everything output to the default ALSA device, there wouldn't be a problem?

Isn't the solution for all application programmers to stop using ESD/ARTS/OSS and use ALSA? Shouldn't we all standardise on ONE sound system to prevent these problems (be it ALSA or any other system?) I, for one, am tired of these sound issues. Is anyone out there trying to standardise Linux sound to prevent these issues?

If anyone knows any of these answers, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.

I think it's already moving in that direction. ALSA is already the default on about all distros(and handles OSS just as well). I got tired of all those different mixers( aRts is one of the most horrible things ever created by the human race and will finally be removed in KDE4) as well and use only ALSA with it's OSS(snd-pcm-oss) emulation and it's dmix sound mixer.
http://alsa.opensrc.org/faq/
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin

why?when I play file .mp3 and any other audio and video at suse linux 10.1 . it is error

That's not really on topic, but anyway...
You need to install codecs for it (can't be distributed with the distro for legal reasons. It very easy to do this yourself:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...=1#post2355993