Lockup Of Programs in FC4

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 19:08 -0400, Jeffrey D. Yuille wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>      After installing FC4, I am experiencing lockups of programs when 
> mplayer is playing along with any other programs I may have open at the 
> time.  Either the program (generally FreeCell Solitaire) will freeze or 
> one of the menu buttons (Applications, Places, or Desktop) will freeze 
> along with it.
> 
>      Is this specifically a bug that someone else has encountered and is 
> there anything I can do about fixing this situation?  Has anyone else 
> experienced this problem?  Any help would be appreciated.

  Fedora-list is really the more appropriate place to ask about this,
but since I ran into this myself, and just fixed it, I figured I'd give
an answer.  Please feel free to re-post the question and this answer to
fedora-list at redhat.com.
  Seems mplayer is doing something funky that confuses esd.  Killing esd
freed up various apps for me that were frozen while mplayer was running.
But if I instead (starting with a fresh login) started mplayer with the
'-ao esd' option, all seemed to work fine.  So putting 'ao=esd' in your
~/.mplayer/config file should fix it for good (or until the next change
in the Linux sound architecture ;-)).

-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets