No sound after using HowTo- a kludge ?

[Peter Garrett]

On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:55:05 +0200
Benjamin Zeller <zeller at ibh-wor.de> wrote:

> On Wednesday 29 June 2005 10:37, Benjamin Zeller wrote:
> > I followed http://www.ubuntuguide.org/#configuresoundproperly
> > 
> > 
> > After reboot, I watched a wmv in Firefox via mplayer-plugin. Sound was 
> playing 
> > fine, but finished after a while.
> > 
> > Now I am at the point mentioned in the subject --> I got no sound after all.
> > 
> > 
> 
> OK, a "mplayer <file>" on command line seems to work, but no sound in e.g. 
> xmms.
> 
> OutputDevide used in xmms is esound (libesdout.so)
> 
> Do I have to change anything after following this HowTo?
> 
> Greetinx,
> 
> 
> Benni

Hi Benni,

I know next to nothing about sound configuration, but I also followed the same howto. What I have now done is to disable esd (esound) *completely* on this machine. I simply made it so that esd can't be executed:

sudo chmod -x /usr/bin/esd

I'm sure this will horrify the purists ;) There is no doubt a better way - but *every* sound problem I was having seemed to relate to this esd daemon. Without it, I am using the oss output of xmms/ beep-media-player without problems. I can also play sound with xine-based apps like totem-xine or xfmedia. Rhythmbox seems to play happily enough as well. There may be some disadvantages to what I've done (system sounds in gnome need to be turned off - not a great loss as far as I'm concerned). 

You might want to try this - it's easy to reverse it if it doesn't work for you ( sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/esd ) . Restarting alsa with  sudo /etc/init.d/alsa restart  might be necessary as well... can't quite remember, as it's now been a while since I did this. 

Peter