Apparently, KDE (maybe phonon) opens all audio devices all the time, resulting in applications giving "Device or resource busy", e.g. -- cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp bash: /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy After modification to the phonon configuration (which device to use) in systemsettings, the problem got partially solved (just after a reboot). After a while (opening a few kde applications, some notification sounds etc...), it again stops working with the above error. I suggest, KDE should release the device when it's not in use and let other applications use it. I'm not using a sound server. Reproducible: Always
phonon-avkode closes the sound output devices when stopped, but this is more of a power-saving issue, but would probably be nice to implement in other backends as well. for your specific problem it sounds like a configuration issue, phonon shouldn't be able to get exclusive control of the device, I would suggest you look into fixing that first. and lastly, what backend are you using?
Actually... Indeed that sounds like the wrong device is selected, or the config gets corrupted resulting in the reappearing wrong-selection, or something in ALSA's software mixing is broken. So to me that sounds a lot like it has little to do with Phonon, other than knotify4 repeatedly accessing the device which ought not be a problem as long as software mixing works.
Currently it's Gstreamer. But killing knotify4 solves the problem (it respaws and doesn't hog the device for some time).
Best Trever handles it then.
Is this still waitingforinfo?
No, setting status correctly.
Phonon enabled debug log please http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Debugging/Phonon
This problem is kind of hard to reproduce now. In the mean time, note -- the application here is not a phonon app. It uses /dev/dsp, i.e. OSS.
Closing for lack of feedback. Please feel free to reopen if you can reproduce this with phonon-backend-gstreamer version 4.6.3 or later and provide a valid debug log as requested in comment #7