Hardware: ASUS A7V Deluxe, AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 1GB DDR 400, onboard Realtek ALC 850 8 channel audio, onboard Marvel gigabit ethernet, Soundblaster Live soundcard, ELSA Gloria III (nVidia Quadro 2 Pro) videocard, two IDE disks, NEC DVD RW, Plextor CD-RW

OS: SuSE 9.3 Pro running linux kernel 2.6.11.4-20a-default x86_64

Problem: I get CPU overload errors from artsd after which it exits. The arts page says that this is most likely a soundcard driver problem (ALSA?). I do not use the onboard Realtek ALC 850 soundcard because it doesn't play MIDIs. Is there a fix for this problem? If not, does anyone know of another soundcard I could get which allows me to play MIDIs and that does not have this problem. If the onboard card can play MIDIs that would be a solution too since the onboard sound works.

Anand

Funny. I've been having the same problem. The only way I've found around it right now is to reinstall the arts package. The error will come back after several days. The sound server does restart on it's own for me each time, but each bootup will be delayed slightly when I enter my xsession while it overloads then restarts.
I haven't found any errors in a single log file anywhere either. I've got Nvidia chipsets all around. I'm on the 64bit chip (3200+). I'm on SuSE 9.2 (kernel 2.6.8).

I reported the problem on the alsa driver buglist since the arts page claims that this is a driver issue. I'm running alsa-1.0.8 which was installed from the SuSE 9.3 Pro x86-64 distribution DVD.

I got a reply in under two minutes claiming that this issue was fixed in alsa-1.0.9! So, I'm off to upgrade probably via the packman alsa x86-64 apt rpms. Is this the right thing to do? I'm picking packman since most of my multimedia stuff is from packman.

Anand

I did an update myself just yesterday and I also ran a KDE update this AM and noticed that a new version of arts was also packaged in. I guess we'll see what happens at this point. I haven't had a problem since, but it was intermittent. I'll post back if the problem comes back.

Thanks

I upgraded alsa via packman's apt repository. The alsa related packages on my system are

alsa-32bit-9.3-7
alsa-tools-1.0.9-0.pm.1
kalsatools-1.5.0-349
alsa-1.0.9-5.1
alsaplayer-0.99.76-72.1
alsa-firmware-1.0.9-0.pm.0
alsamodular-1.8.7-5
kalsatools-debuginfo-1.5.0-348
alsa-devel-1.0.9-5.1
alsamixergui-0.9.0rc1-544
alsa-tools-gui-1.0.9-0.pm.1

where the .pms are packman packages. Don't recall which repository had alsa-1.0.9. I haven't seen the arts "CPU overload error, exiting" message so far. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Anand

I have gotten the artsd error, but in Mandriva LE 2005 X86_64 after login. Sound still works but before long my gig of ram is almost at full load and not using swapfile. But thats not the worst part, I cant find alsa-1.0.9 for X86_64 for Mandriva. I found the 1.0.9rc3 for cooker, but I want the final release. Would the Suse X86_64 alsa from packman work for Mandriva?

If alsa-1.0.9 is available for SuSE 9.3 x86_64, it should also be available for Mandriva. Having said that, I obviously don't know for sure.

Also, it does not solve the problem completely but it does alleviate the problem. I still get the same error but much more rarely.

Anand