GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 371822
Evince is opening the sound device for no apparent reason
Last modified: 2008-09-07 18:26:50 UTC
Please describe the problem: Whenever I open any file on Evince, and then try to play some music on any media player (say, XMMS, or whichever you like the most), I get an error message saying that the audio device is currently in use, and thus sound cannot be played. Some applications even choose without warning to output sound to /dev/null instead. It goes without saying that this is incredibly annoying. Running lsof /dev/dsp gives Evince as the culprit: COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME evince 4667 fibonacci 36u CHR 14,3 4029 /dev/dsp However, Evince does not produce any sound at all - and I don't expect it to. Steps to reproduce: 1. Open a document with Evince. 2. Run lsof /dev/dsp Actual results: Evince has opened /dev/dsp and does not produce any sound. Expected results: Evince does not open /dev/dsp at all. Does this happen every time? Only if no other program is generating sound at the time Evince is run. Other information: I have posted this bug in the Fedora Forum too: http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=124165 It has also been posted on the Ubuntu forums: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=215694 None of the threads has received an answer so far.
It does not on my machine. Can you reproduce with the latest version? Perhaps the cause is somewhere down the stack, eg. libgnomeui...
Anyone knows which YUM package do I need to update to update Evince? Running "yum update evince" returns a package not found error.
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!
Evince 0.6.1 (which, I believe, is the last version) under Ubuntu Edgy is now opening /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p, which has the same effect as directly opening /dev/dsp in the previous version - namely, no audio output from any other applications.
Please provide strace log. You can collect it with strace evince somedocument >& strace.log
Interesting comment: http://www.tigert.com/archives/2006/10/23/acroread-your-new-multimedia-application/#comments Heh, I just had the same thing with file-roller in Ubuntu Edgy of all applications (remembered this post and went back to it to see what that lsof command was). Really weird, why would an archive-opening application block sound…? Probably it's accessibility or something else that opens sound. We need to debug this situation.
Created attachment 87428 [details] strace log of Evince, bzip2'ed. Just when I thought it wouldn't happen again... it did. No sound from other apps, I check lsof, and see this: COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME (...) evince 9636 fibonacci 88r CHR 116,2 13877 /dev/snd/timer evince 9636 fibonacci 89u CHR 116,8 14605 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p I got a ~30MB strace log file, which I'm attaching to this post in bzip2'ed form.
This happened to me too. Here is the lsof output evince 3288 me 87r CHR 116,2 13763 /dev/snd/timer evince 3288 me 90u CHR 116,4 13954 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
I have also seen this problem occurring but I suspect it is due to evince being launched by Firefox - unfortunately it seems that Firefox does not close file descriptors when it spawns helper apps - hence if firefox has the audio dev open (quite often the case after using Flash etc) then evince inherits the open audio descriptor and hangs onto it - even after Firefox quits. It would appear that this bug has been reported on Firefox bugzilla but not fixed yet??! See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147659
I'm sure we are not using the sound device. It has to be firefox issue. Thanks for your help.