Hola, Linux folk!
I have lost 90% of my sound in Redhat 9 and could sorely use some direction in getting it back.

[background]
I just download America's Army for linux. I had multiple problems with 2.0 hanging right at the end of the download, so I found version 1.9 and downloaded that.
To keep things nice and neat, I created a separate "gamer" user and installed the game to as that user.
The game installed and started seemingly without a hitch. At this time, I have sound. I go under settings and play around with the options. I have a nice Audigy platinum card so I choose the "software and hardware with EAX" option. At that point, the game hangs, but I am able to log out and log back in and the sound is still there.
All seems great and fine and I play AA for awhile before I need to get back to my account where I get all my work done.

[problem]
When I log back into my regular account- most of my sound is gone. Gaim and XMMS sound doesn't work anymore.
I do get the little systems beeps that tell me when I have mail, or that Emacs doesn't like what I am doing. Unfortunately, that's about it. I do get the test sound when I try the Detect Sound Card applet.

I have tried various combinations of settings with XMMS. I either get a message that my output filter is wrong or my soundcard is blocked, etc., etc. I have fooled around with XMMS so much now, I can't remember what the settings were supposed to be originally.

[plea for help]
All hints, comments, and suggestions appreciated. I really miss my sound!

Thanks,
Danny

It happens to me and for some reason the armyops binary does not exit properly. Try running top and sorting by memory usage or do ps -aux | grep armyops. Find the pid of the binary and kill the application. You'll notice that once you kill it it turns into a zombie process and your cpu usage goes up to 100%. After a minute or so the process will die completly and you should have freed up your sound.

Let me know if that works.

Hola,

I have restored sound, but I honestly don't understand the how of it all. I looked, but the armyops process wasn't hanging around, so I started poking around with other stuff.

In playing around with different things, I realized that my "gamer" account and my root account had full sound. Trying to access the volume control in the my user account informed that I could no longer access the mixer. Turns out that "gamer" somehow made itself the owner of the mixer.

Going back into my user account, I opened up a terminal window and ran "ps -aux| grep gamer". gamer had this one little process open. SU to root and kill the process. Doesn't seem like anything happens. I run "ps -aux | esd" just to see what is happening. When I do that I get a funny "boop-boop-a-loop" and the prompt returned to me. Just to make sure that finals week at my university aren't causing me delusions, I do it again. Same little musical sound.

I don't know what it did, but I was able to play XMMS, hear Gaim sounds, etc. I really don't understand how ps -aux | grep esd somehow kick the sound server into action. Every time I am getting ready to pat myself on the back for knowing how to make Linux work, something like this comes along and smacks me in the face.

If anybody would like to shed some light, I sure wouldn't mine listening.


Danny

OK, my problem isn't exactly fixed!!! My previous "ps -aux | esd" trick was done in a terminal window as root. If I close that term window, all sound cuts off. What gives??


Thanks,
Danny