# ESD

The Enlightened Sound Daemon was used by gnome to play system sounds on certain events - like login, logout, etc. It has since been replaced by "libcanberra for event sounds or GStreamer/PulseAudio for everything else."[1].

There is one built with alsa support(the normal one) and an additional built with oss support in the AUR

# Starting ESD

There's not much to setup apart from adding esd to the DAEMONS line in /etc/rc.conf like this:

    DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network netfs crond alsa esd mpd hal fam gdm cupsd)

# Troubleshooting

-Is esd hogging your sound device and you can't uninstall it since gnome requires it to install/build?

put

    esdctl off

in a startup file(like .xinitrc, or use gnome-session, kde....)

problem solved!

to see if anything is hogging your sound devices run fuser as root or sudo.

    sudo fuser /dev/snd/*

and

    sudo fuser /dev/sound/*

example:

    kris|~$ sudo fuser /dev/sound/*
    /dev/sound/mixer:     3504

Then you can use

    ps auxw|grep 3504

for example, to see what is hogging the device.

Category:

- Audio/Video