[ILUG] sound problem(s?), aRts mysteriously now silent?

[Brian Foster]

 Here we go again --- the fscking sound is baffling me again.
 Ok, symptoms this time:  The world was working great.  Then
 it stopped.  XMMS, JuK, and Xine all went into a tight loop
 early during startup; strace(1) showed each was doing first
 a select(2) which was timing out, several gettimeofday(2)s,
 the select again, repeat ad infinitum.  Weird.

 I then noticed that on each login, including after a reboot,
 I was now getting a KDE pop-up message from KNotify written
 in invisible ink (No! sorry, I seem to have lost the paper
 I copied it down on... ;-(  ) but which had something to do
 with audio.  So, taking that as a hint, I reconfigured the
 audio using YaST2 (no problems).  No more KNotify mystery.

 XMMS and JuK now start up and act as-if there is sound coming
 out.  But there is no sound.  (All this is when playing files
 previously ripped to the hard disc.)  Xine, however, can now
 play an .ogg file Ok, as can play(1), aplay(1), and Rhythmbox.

 I noticed `play' runs sox(1) with `-t ossdsp /dev/dsp' output.
 Using that as hint, I reconfigured XMMS to use OSS rather than
 automagically guess the output thingy.  da da da Dum!  XMMS is
 now working.

 Which just leaves JuK.  Now having evidence the problem was
 something broke in something non-OSS, I poked around inside
 JuK with strings(1) and found it always(?) uses aRts (which
 is, I _think_, a KDE sound something).  Playing around some
 with the `artsshell' and `artsplay' commands makes me think
 it is indeed aRts which has gone belly-up for some reason.

 At which point I'm stuck.  Any ideas?

 As to the obvious question, “what changed?”, I've no idea.
 There were a number of YaST2-fetched/installed updates
 between when this was all last known to be working and when
 it was discovered broken, including something which somehow
 fscked up my default KDE font settings.  ;-(   I presume an
 update did it, but have no proof one way or another.

 So anyways, presuming the problem is this aRts thingie, what
 do I look for?   And, for that matter, where is the doc on
 aRts?  I cannot find any on my system.  ;-(

cheers!
	-blf-
-- 
Experienced (20+ years) kernel engineer: |  Brian Foster      Montpellier,
 · Unix, ChorusOS, &tc; · documentation; |  blf at utvinternet.ie      FRANCE
 · IDL, testing, process, embedded, &tc. |    Stop E$$o (ExxonMobile)!
Résumé:  http://www.blf.utvinternet.ie   |        http://www.stopesso.com