Restart audio

[eloy]

Hi,
I'm a RH9 user. I own a PII 866 Mhz - 384 MB RAM - VIA Motherboard with integrated audio.

My probles is: when I use XMMS or xinetd, sometimes the application gets blocked and I have to kill it with the command "xkill". After that I cannot hear any audio, and only restarting the system the problem solves.

Is there any way to restart the audio without restarting the whole system?
Any other solution is accepted too.

Thanks a lot.

[Dolda2000]

Well, the thing with xkill is that it doesn't actually kill the program - it just severs the connection to the X server. That means that the program will usually kill itself once it detects that condition, but if the program is blocking in another call, it will never detect that condition and will continue keeping the audio device open forever.

Thus, if you have a soundcard which only supports one player, you'll need to actually kill any application that has hung while playing audio. For example:

killall -KILL xmms

However, I find myself a bit perplexed as to why xmms should be hanging in the first place. Shouldn't you try and figure out the cause of that instead? =)

[eloy]

I explain you my last actions:
1- open xine
2- xine doesn't responds
3- after waiting for several minutes (doing other things meanwhile) I execute xkill and kill the xine window.

[root@servidor root]#top
 19:27:11  up  2:44,  2 users,  load average: 0,91, 0,75, 0,71
63 processes: 61 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  39,3% user   3,3% system   0,0% nice   0,0% iowait  57,2% idle
Mem:   319896k av,  314716k used,    5180k free,       0k shrd,   11812k buff
                    227180k actv,    1092k in_d,    5244k in_c
Swap:  329292k av,  111760k used,  217532k free                  129224k cached
                                                                                                                                                             
  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
 2641 root      15   0 25444  24M  4956 S    21,7  7,9  27:58   0 xmule
 2515 root      16   0 80440  22M  1148 R    13,7  7,1  18:12   0 X
 3646 root      15   0 10156 9,9M  7192 S     4,9  3,1   0:02   0 gnome-terminal
 2618 root      15   0  4592 4276  2400 S     1,1  1,3   0:39   0 metacity
 2622 root      15   0 10076 9060  3628 S     0,1  2,8   0:38   0 gnome-panel
 2632 root      15   0  5856 2128  1076 S     0,1  0,6   0:41   0 rhn-applet-gui
 2647 root      15   0 32164  31M 11724 S     0,1 10,0   8:45   0 mozilla-bin
 3676 root      15   0  1060 1060   856 R     0,1  0,3   0:00   0 top
    1 root      15   0   104   80    56 S     0,0  0,0   0:04   0 init
    2 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 keventd
    3 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 kapmd
    4 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0,0  0,0   0:00   0 ksoftirqd_CPU0
    9 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 bdflush
    5 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 kswapd
    6 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 kscand/DMA
    7 root      16   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:08   0 kscand/Normal
    8 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 kscand/HighMem
   10 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 kupdated
   11 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 mdrecoveryd
   15 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 kjournald
   72 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 khubd
  305 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 usb-storage-0
  306 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 scsi_eh_0
 2003 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 eth0
 2126 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 eth1
 2179 root      15   0   184  152   104 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 syslogd
 2183 root      15   0    48   40     0 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 klogd
 2201 rpc       15   0    76   16     0 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 portmap
 2220 rpcuser   25   0    92    0     0 SW    0,0  0,0   0:00   0 rpc.statd
 2287 root      24   0    48    4     0 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 apmd
 2324 root      25   0   240    4     0 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 sshd
 2338 root      15   0   132    4     0 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 xinetd
 2347 root      15   0    84   56    36 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 gpm
 2357 bin       15   0   456   40    12 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 cannaserver
 2368 root      15   0   148  132    88 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 crond
 2379 root      15   0   932  540   376 S     0,0  0,1   0:01   0 cupsd
 2439 xfs       15   0  2696  944   212 S     0,0  0,2   0:00   0 xfs
 2457 daemon    15   0   180  160   120 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 atd
 2465 root      23   0    48    4     0 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 mingetty
 2466 root      23   0    48    4     0 S     0,0  0,0   0:00   0 mingetty

After this, the audio reproduces nothing. Even killing xinetd I can't initialize xmms or any other application of that kind. If I run again xinetd I works perfectly but without audio.

I runned the soundcard detection application, it detects the soundcard and when I do the soundtest I hear nothing again.

Mod edit - added code tags.

[Dolda2000]

Hmm? You're not supposed to kill xinetd if it is xine that hangs. If you run "/sbin/pidof xine", after you have xkilled it, does it report any numbers?

[eloy]

[root@servidor windows]# /sbin/pidof xine
3150
[root@servidor windows]# killall -KILL xine

As soon as I executed the last line I heard the testsound.

Thanks a lot.

P.D.: When I grow up I want to be moderator like you

[Dolda2000]

P.D.: When I grow up I want to be moderator like you

ROTFL =)