[CLUE-Tech] Confict With MIDI Players

[Matt Gushee]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 12:01:01PM -0600, Vern B. Southern wrote:
> I have a conflict on my Mandrake 9.1 OS with midi players.  When I try to use 
> Konqueror to open a HTML page on the Internet the OS calls kmid to play the 
> midi.  I get an error message when I try to use kmid anywhere on the OS. 
> 
> Couldn't open /dev/sequencer
> Probably there is another program using it.

I wouldn't take the second line too seriously. It's quite common for
error messages to guess wrong about the cause of the error.

>  I can use kmidi to open and play midi files but the OS default is kmid.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the OS default." If you just mean that
that's what Mandrake installs by default, then that shouldn't make any
difference. Or it could be that Mandrake specifies kmid as the default
handler for MIDI files. It still shouldn't matter. The only way there
could really be a conflict between the two applications is if kmid is
already running. That's possible if kmid uses a client-server
architecture, and the daemon (which will take exclusive control of the
sequencer device) is started at boot time. You would have to check the
kmid documentation to be sure of that.

But I would bet it's a permissions problem. What does

 # ls -l /dev/sequencer

tell you?

If it looks like this (the left-hand column is the key):

  crw-------    1 root     root     14,   1 Oct 28  2003 /dev/sequencer

then only root has permission to read or write this device. That's done
for security reasons, but on a single-user system it doesn't really
matter. You can open up the device to regular users with:

 # chmod 666 /dev/sequencer

Hope this helps.

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
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mgushee at havenrock.com           its fields;
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