Getting hopeless on Hoary

[Daniel Robitaille]

> > I had the same problem with Realplayer in Hoary (but not Warty) when I
> > switched back from polypaudio to esound.. To solve it I add to set
> > auto_spawn=1
> > in /etc/esound/esd.conf  (and then log again)
> 
> YES!!! Thankyou! That worked. And VLC is working as well. Dare I try
> skype... YES! Thanks very much! I can't believe it was *that* simple.

there is a possible downside:  the man page for esd recommend against
doing this if your gnome sound events are enabled.  I have no idea
why, and an e-mail to this list a few days ago about this didn't
produce one reply.  But it works fine with my machine, and it appears
that this was the esd configuration for my Warty's installation which
also worked fine for the last 6 months.