Connection problem related to ALSA and viewer minimise workaround

Hi,

I have had a problem since joining SL where the viewer would crash at "connecting to region" after *much* fiddling it appears that ALSA seems responsible. If i disable that i can connect almost every time. I have managed to connect with ALSA and got sound but it is very unstable at connecting. I now have alsa disabled and have left OSS enabled and I seem to be able to connect almost every time now and get sound (although streaming music has just crashed my viewer). The only issue with using OSS is that it hogs the entire sound system but its a big improvment being able to connect.

Is there any debugging info I can provide to help sort this ALSA issue out?


My other problem of the viewer crashing/loosing pictures when minimised or covered etc, I also have a workaround. I have set SL to have its own login on my box. So i added a user SL to the system and in the /home/sl directory i copied all the secondlife files and the .secondlife files to /home/sl/. Then i set a /home/sl/.xsession to have :-

./secondlife
exit

so when i log in as sl i get just the viewer, no desktop etc (i did have to add the sound group to the user sl to get sound)

Now i can also login on another VT so i can then just ctrl+alt+F7 ctrl+alt+F8 to switch between the game and normal desktop (or if only the game not have any desktop loaded to same memory/processor power)

Ok More playing has proven all my issues to be with alsa so i now tried SL back on my KDE desktop and without asla, connections to the game and minimising windows are all fine.

Possible workarounds on the desktop, I am currently playing with the artsdsp wrapper.

What i have done is disable alsa in the secondlife start script, left OSS enabled (which will not work on its own) then done the following mod :-

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="`pwd`"/lib:"`pwd`"/app_settings/mozilla-runtime-linux-i686:"${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}" artsdsp bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin `cat gridargs.dat` $@ | cat

note the additional artsdsp in there that allows SL to use the OSS interface but this is mapped externaly through the kde artsd to the sound system. Also aoss will work there but for me performance was bad.

Using the artsdsp wrapper still gives a few sound glitches which are improved by increasing the artsd sound buffer time and steaming music still gives issues but I am moving in the correct direction!

I have the same problem.

Kubuntu Feisty (7.04)
AMD Athlon 3500+
nVidia 6600 GT

That workaround didn't help me- and I don't know how to revert it (about 1 time out of 5 I could get in, and sound would play for a while- then it would just shut off). Even 1 time out of 5 for log in with sound is better than constant login but no sound.

Help?

Does it work if you disable sound completley.

Ie set :-

export LL_BAD_ESD=y
export LL_BAD_OSD=y
export LL_BAD_ALSA=y

in the ./secondlife script

Yes- sorry I wasn't clear.

I cannot get sound working with OSS, only ALSA works, and since using

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="`pwd`"/lib:"`pwd`"/app_settings/mozilla-runtime-linux-i686:"${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}" artsdsp bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin `cat gridargs.dat` $@ | cat

it doesn't work at all.

That's the bit I want to revert, until a better solution comes up (or my brain starts working again ).

Thanks

If you want to revert that (undo) just remove the artsdsp bit leave the rest alone or you can safely restore from the secondlife-XXX-tar.bz2 as this only overwrites the game executables and scripts etc. All the user data is stored in your home directory.

Thanks My brain is messed up at the moment- I couldn't remember where I'd done it