Ross Boylan <RossBoylan at stanfordalumni.org> wrote:
> The only real problem area has been sound.  I don't have any. I'm not
> sure if I did before the upgrade.  Though I have hazy memories of
> having hacked my image to turn off sound, I don't have any in the
> stock 3.6 image from the deb either.

I'm a big fan of the Network Audio System, the oldest, and most
featureful network sound system for Unix.  You can even buy NEC X
terminals that have this built into them.  NAS is mature and it's well
engineered, and I do not at all understand why the Linux guys are not
jumping all over it.  I also don't see why esd exists at all; nas was
mature when the esd project began.

Anyway, you do not have to go with the herd.  You can use nasd, and then
run Squeak/Unix with the NAS sound driver.  You can run legacy OSS
programs using "audioss" (available in Debian's apt repos), and you can
run silly ESD programs by running "esd" itself under audiooss.



> I get "sound: /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy" on the terminal when
> I try to use sound.  Seems like the classic problem where both want to
> own the sound device; I don't know if there's an easy solution.  

Incidentally, you may want to try running "fuser -va /dev/dsp" as root
in order to see who is using the audio device.  I'm guessing it's esd or
artsd, but Squeak can't talk to either of those daemons.  I've looked into
implementing support for each of them on multiple occasions, but given
up on it every time.  esd doesn't support what Squeak needs, and
I had trouble finding a comprehensible way to talk to artsd from a simple
C program.


-Lex