Living without Windows!

Sound Works!

It is Saturday afternoon. My sister and brother-in-law can arrive any minute now to have dinner. Just enough time to cram out a short article.

As you might remember from an earlier article in this series, I use the OpenSound software to drive my laptop's sound hardware. The release I initially downloaded and installed worked relatively fine, but had the irritating quirk that it froze the sound system after a random period (usually somewhere between one and two hours). Overcome with joy that I finally managed to get some sound from the speakers I solved this problem the QaD way: I wrote a small script called "soundbounce" which executed every hour on the hour through cron. "soundbounce" did nothing more (and nothing less) than executing OSS's "soundoff" and "soundon" commands. This reset the sound system (and therefore also the volume!). A bit irritating, but it worked.

However, I decided to also open a support call at the OpenSound boys & girls to see if a more structural solution could be found. I must say that I am impressed with their support: it responds quickly and to the point, which is all the more surprising because I send e-mails at the strangest hours (even considering the various timezone differences). After sending some e-mails hence and forth they advised me to download the newest software (which had since been released). I did so, installed it, and...... IT WORKED! No more sudden freezes, no resets of the volume halfway a track (in the middle of a meeting which I livened up with some soft background music :-). Soundbounce has been disabled and sound keeps on working, even through numerous suspend/resume cycles. I am currently sitting on our terrace, in the sun, listening to some Acid Jazz playing from the hard disk (copied of an audio CD carefully put together by one of the attendees of a Perl course I hosted. Thank you Paul!

Many thanks to the guys&girls at OpenSound!

My next missions: trying to get my IRDA infrared and TV/VGA port working. There have to be challenges in life!

++Jos