ender-1
07-08-2002, 05:11 PM
To all of those who have decided to give Linux a shot and want to get RealPlayer up and running under Redhat 7.X and/or Mandrake 8.X distributions, you probably have a headache. You probably get an error saying that it cannot open the sound device because another application may be using it. Pretty annoying, eh?
In some cases you are dealing with a permissions problem. You can verify this by changing user to root and see if you have the same problem. If RealPlayer works all of a sudden, you definitely have a permissions problem and there are TONS of howto's for that. But what if you switch to root and still get this error?
There is a simple yet effective solution to this problem. I found it to work on Redhat/Mandrake but it may work for you. This problem is caused because there is a sound daemon running, in this case it is aRTs. The sound daemon takes control of the sound device and unless there are no sounds for a specified amount of time (usu. 60 seconds), Realplayer will think the sound device is busy.
To get RealPlayer to work, make sure that you have linked the "realplay" executable in the /usr/local/bin directory, after which you should be able to start realplay from ANY path by simply typing "realplay". Once you have done that, make sure you have exited RealPlayer if you have it running and type this at the command line (you do not have to be root):
artsdsp realplay
Voila! You are telling the sound daemon to run RealPlayer and you should get in the program with no error message and you should have sound now! The next step is to edit the plugins for your internet browser. Find the realplayer plugins and edit the command line for the application so it says "artsdsp realplay %s". This will correct the problem for your browser. To those who wondered, I installed RealPlayer 8 using the RPM package as root, using the Package Manager.
I'm not sure how many people this will help but I had to search long and hard to figure this out so hope it helps somebody!
Thanks
In some cases you are dealing with a permissions problem. You can verify this by changing user to root and see if you have the same problem. If RealPlayer works all of a sudden, you definitely have a permissions problem and there are TONS of howto's for that. But what if you switch to root and still get this error?
There is a simple yet effective solution to this problem. I found it to work on Redhat/Mandrake but it may work for you. This problem is caused because there is a sound daemon running, in this case it is aRTs. The sound daemon takes control of the sound device and unless there are no sounds for a specified amount of time (usu. 60 seconds), Realplayer will think the sound device is busy.
To get RealPlayer to work, make sure that you have linked the "realplay" executable in the /usr/local/bin directory, after which you should be able to start realplay from ANY path by simply typing "realplay". Once you have done that, make sure you have exited RealPlayer if you have it running and type this at the command line (you do not have to be root):
artsdsp realplay
Voila! You are telling the sound daemon to run RealPlayer and you should get in the program with no error message and you should have sound now! The next step is to edit the plugins for your internet browser. Find the realplayer plugins and edit the command line for the application so it says "artsdsp realplay %s". This will correct the problem for your browser. To those who wondered, I installed RealPlayer 8 using the RPM package as root, using the Package Manager.
I'm not sure how many people this will help but I had to search long and hard to figure this out so hope it helps somebody!
Thanks