Re: how to get sound back?

[Marc Shapiro <mshapiro_42@yahoo.com>]

Hugh Lawson wrote:
> Marc Shapiro <mshapiro_42@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> > My system occasionally loses sound.  In my case, it is invariably a
> > runaway firefox process that was trying to play flash and something
> > went wrong.  I find the offending process (this is normally an extra
> > process, separate from any currently active firefox process) and kill
> > it and that will generally bring sound back without any more drastic
> > actions.
>
>
> That could have been the problem.  
>
> Would you mind explaining a little more how you isolate the offending
> process?  Or post a reference URL that covers this issue?

Since, in my case, it is almost alway Firefox that has caused the 
problem, I run the following script.  All it does is parse the output of 
'ps' and lists all Firefox processes that it finds.  Usually there 
should be three: one each for myself, my wife and my daughter.  Anything 
beyond that is suspect.  If you should only have a single instance of 
Firefox then shut it down and run this script.  If it finds anything 
then it probably needs to be killed.  I also use this script to find 
which of the three Firefox processes is hogging all of the memory, or 
CPU time when the system grinds to a standstill.


#!/usr/bin/perl

&check_ps;

exit();

# Subroutines #

sub check_ps {
        @message=`ps -eo pid,uid,%cpu,%mem,comm`;
        $message_text='';

        foreach (@message) {
                ($pid, $uid, $cpu, $mem, $comm) = split(' ', $_, 5);
                chomp $comm;
                if ($uid >= 1000) {
                        if ($comm eq 'firefox-bin') {
                                print $_;
                        }
                }

        }

}


--
Marc Shapiro
mshapiro_42@yahoo.com