Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 5113
Permissin problem with Gnome and Esound
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:51 EDT
there's something weird about the way Gnome launches esd. A little background to answer questions you may have: This has been duplicated on other systems. All users have been given rights to the necessary devices in /dev/ and can successfully launch esd themselves (if it's not already running of course) Now to the issue. When I log into Gnome as user1 (it can be any user actually) and esd starts up, user1 can play sounds with no problem. If I then log out and log in as user2 (or just open a terminal and su user2) and try to play something through esd (like x11amp) it says it could not open audio. If user1 kills esd and relaunches it (or even if I have user2 launch it in the previously mentioned terminal), it then works for both users. It seems that Gnome somehow launches it locked because it also works for both users if user1 runs esdctl unlock as opposed to killing and restarting esd. The weird thing is, I even tried adding some start up commands to the Gnome session manager to kill `pidof esd` and then restart esd and it still had the same problem and I had to esdctl unlock in order for both users to use esd. If I only added kill `pidof esd` to the startup commands and subsequently started esd from a terminal once logged in, it works fine, without needing the esdctl unlock command. For the time being, my work around is to add esdctl unlock to everbody's Gnome session manager start up commands. I hope this makes sense. I tried to consolidate the different scenarios I came across while testing this out. Anyway, is this how it's supposed to work? Is there a way for Gnome to not start esd "locked" like this other than my lame workaround? ------- Additional Comments From 09/16/99 20:29 ------- I don't know if this behavior you described is a bug, but here's another workaround I found when I installed RHL6.0 on my ThinkPad 600E laptop. It comes from Thomas Hood (http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~thood/tp600lnx.htm) and works fine for me. Add the following to the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local file: /usr/bin/esd -nobeeps -as 2 -public & Thomas explains all the parameters in his document. Good luck. Jorge Martin (jorge.martin@eds.com)
I can't reproduce the specified behaviour (logout, login as another user, try to use sound) in RHL 6.1. However, su'ing to another user (e.g. trying to use sound as another user while one user is currently using sound) will not work, because esd is strictly on a per-user basis to avoid security problems.