Well, after being annoyed by this on and off for over ten years, with
no detectable pattern, I finally got fed up and spent the day using gdb
(not very successfully) and adding diagnostic output. It turns out the
error is generated in the gkrellmss source file src/sdlib-alsa.c in the
function gss_alsa_init. The call to snd_pcm_open is failing with "No
such file or directory" because it is trying to open plughw:0,0, and
sound card 0 is currently disabled. I have not found any way to
configure this in the running program or plugin. However, there IS a
line "sound ALSA device plughw:0,0" in ~/.gkrellm2/user-config, and
changing it to plughw:1,0 lets it start up and work fine. In
retrospect, the pattern is that it worked if the first configured sound
card was ok, but failed if the first configured sound card was
disabled. (Currently, I have HDMI output disabled, and am using the
generic audio output, which is card 1.)
Posting now without a code fix just to help anyone still searching for
a solution. I think the short term fix would at least change the code
so that pop-up error is a bit more specific (and helpful) about what
actually went wrong, and I'll consider trying to do that. The longer
term fix would be to allow the specific sound card to be configured
with the plugin running, but that's a bit beyond me for now.
Jack
On 2010.09.04 13:40, Jack wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've resurfaced an old problem, and wanted to see if there was ever
> any resolution. It's mentioned in a thread on the Gentoo forums at
> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-236638.html, and searching shows
> up at least one other thread. In that case, the solution seemed to
> be creating a ~/.asoundrc, but I have not had any luck with that yet.
>
> The problem is that when gkrellmss starts, I get a popup: Can't open
> ALSA monitoring. Look for an "ALSA lib" console error message. I
> now see nothing at all about alsa in my capture of stderr from my X
> session, and nothing in /var/log/messages or in dmesg. The gkrellmss
> panel has "Sound error? Click here to try to open." In the past,
> clicking would eventually get it to work. Now it just gives the same
> popup.
>
> I'm currently on gkrellm 2.3.4, gkrellmss 2.6, and alsa 1.0.21.
>
> Thanks for any hints or suggestions on how to track this down.
>
> Jack
>
>
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