Tonight I logged out from one user account and logged into another.
When Gnome came up, there was no sound. I checked the volume, read
some documentation, and eventually checked ~/.xsession-errors. I
discovered that I was getting errors with the 'esd' sound daemon.
After some Googling, I found that others (on various distributions of
Linux using Gnome) have experienced the same problem: 'esd' is
supposed to be killed when a user logs out, but if it isn't killed
then the next user trying to log in is prevented from using sound
because of permissions on a temporary 'esd' socket not being reset.
Have some of you had the same problem? Is there a cure for it, or is
it a randomly occurring thing that is a kind of annoyance?
Dave W.
This is a typical problem that tons of users have experienced. Esd may
support releasing the sound device node after a short timeout. Check its
manual pages.
Alternately, if your sound card doesn't support multiple sources at once,
and you're using alsa, you can set up alsa to software mix for you,
allowing each user to "grab" and alsa device node, and use it with
impunity. Check out the alsa web site for their asounrc documentation.
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/asoundrc.php
Hope that helps,
Justin