Disabling esound / esd + XMMS w/ ALSA on PPC

[Rob Diehl]

The fact that esd interferes with ALSA is known, however.. where is the 
esd process spawned during the boot process? I am converting my iMac 
over to using purely ALSA. Doing ok so far, except esd keeps spawning 
when I reboot and locking my sound device (snd-powermac). In order for 
ALSA to work, I have to manually kill the process which is kinda 
irritating.

Also, for anyone on an old iMac or PowerMac who wants to use ALSA, I 
have found that XMMS works well (not installed in Ubuntu by default, but 
you can get it from the Synaptic Package Manager in System 
Configuration). My machine in particular is a bondi blue iMac 233 mhz. 
To get XMMS working properly with ALSA go to XMMS -> Options -> 
Preferences -> Output Plugin. Select ALSA, then click on Configure. Set 
the Audio device to PowerMac Burgundy, Mixer device to "Master". In 
Advanced Settings, you must set the Period time (ms) to 5 or less. 
Otherwise you will get all kinds of popping and the playback speed will 
be too fast.

Also, make sure you've got the "snd-powermac" module listed in 
/etc/modules. And if the "esd" process is running you'll need to open up 
a root terminal and kill -9 the process (run "ps -A" to find it).

I just wish I could drag-n-drop from a Samba share onto XMMS. For some 
reason, it doesn't work. Once I copy a file from the Samba share into a 
local directory, then drag-n-drop from there, it works fine. Weird.

-Rob