[Tfug] sdl audio

[Ammon Lauritzen]

What follows is the description of a problem that I finally managed to
solve... since I was within seconds of posting the message when the
solution finally made itself aparent... I'm sending it anyways just to let
people know of this wierd behavior.

Recently, I noticed that my machine was unable to produce sound from any
program relying on sdl. I have no idea when this problem cropped up, or if
it has been an issue ever since I rebuilt the machine several months ago
since xmms doesn't go through sdl and my mplayer config defaults to use
oss.

So, I yanked the Debian SDL packages and compiled it myself. No
difference. I ran MAKEDEV. No change. I removed ALSA just because I felt
like it. No change. I recompiled my kernel to include the audio stuff in
stead of putting it in a module, etc... nothing worked... until I started
writing this email.

ZSNES says:
Sound init failed!
freq: 44100, channels: 2, samples: 1024

MPlayer says:
SDL: Samplerate: 48000Hz Channels: Stereo Format Signed 16-bit
(Little-Endian)
SDL: Unable to open audio: No available audio device
Could not open/initialize audio device -> no sound.
Audio: no sound

Wesnoth says:
Could not initialize audio: No available audio device

ls /dev/dsp /dev/mixer says:
crw-rw----    1 root     audio     14,   3 Nov  4 01:52 /dev/dsp
crw-rw----    1 root     audio     14,   0 Nov  4 01:52 /dev/mixer

/dev/sound/mixer is a symlink to /dev/mixer...

But no link from /dev/sound/dsp -> /dev/dsp exists.

Creating the link suddenly allowed sound to work... is this normal? Does
everyone else have this symlink? I never noticed it until just now.

--
Ammon Lauritzen
ammon at simud.org

Systems Analyst
Arizona Student Media
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Cell: (520) 861-4680

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