[CLUE-Tech] Confict With MIDI Players

[Matt Gushee]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 06:19:53PM -0600, Vern B. Southern wrote:
> On Wednesday 11 August 2004 04:47 pm, Matt Gushee wrote:
> > I'm not sure what you mean by "the OS default." 
> 
> When I open the directory where I keep all my midi files and click on 
> anyfile.mid the Mandrake operating system opens the midi file with Kmidi and 
> everything works just fine.

Okay, I getcha. To get anal about for just a moment, it's not really the
OS per se that does that, it's the file manager. And the correct term
for that setup is a "file association." But I won't belabor that.

> When I use the Konqueror Web Browser and I go to a webpage that has a midi 
> file embedded into the HTML code on the webpage the Konqueror Web Browser 
> tries to open the midi using Kmid and Kmid gives me this infernal error 
> message:
> 
> Couldn't open /dev/sequencer
> Probably there is another program using it.

Oh, that's from Kmid, which is the default? Then that strengthens my
suspicion that it's a permissions problem.

> Kmid is a Midi/Karaoke player with music and text. Kmidi just plays midi 
> files.  Quite frankly I have no use at all for a karaoke player so I don't 
> care if Kmid ever works.

What, you don't like karaoke?! The horror!

;-)

> What I would like to do is make Kmidi the default midi player but everything I 
> have tried has failed.  I checked to see if I could just remove Kmid but it 
> is part of a package of software which includes Kmidi.

Well, that's a pain. But there's probably no need to remove Kmid.

> When it comes to line commands I am completely lost.  What I did is logged out 
> from user and logged in as root.  I checked the permissions on Kmid and Kmidi 
> and found that they are the same.

On the programs themselves? That's usually not very helpful.

> I have looked all over to find dev/sequencer and I can't find it anywhere.  I 
> am at a complete loss at what to do.  Any suggestions?

Well, if /dev/sequencer doesn't exist, that would be the first thing you
need to fix. But given that Mandrake installs a MIDI player by default,
I'd be very surprised if it didn't create /dev/sequencer.

Okay, first of all, I'm getting the sense you aren't very familiar with
Linux file path notation. Notice that I wrote '/dev/sequencer'. The
leading slash is important: it indicates an *absolute path*. That means,
if you visualize the file system as a tree, there is a single root from
which all the directories (AKA "folders") branch out. So if you go to
the root, represented by '/', you should find a directory called 'dev'.
The dev directory contains all your system's *device files*, which are
the principal means for interacting with actual hardware devices. And if
you go into that directory, you should find a file called 'sequencer'.
If you're using a graphical file manager, you just go up (by clicking on
'..', maybe?) until you get to the top, then go down into 'dev'. From
the command line, you do:

  ls /dev

To get a list of the /dev directory's contents. But if you omit the
slash, i.e.

  ls dev

then it tries to find a 'dev' *in the current directory*, which, unless
you are already in the root directory, probably doesn't exist and is
certainly not what you want. Make sense?

One further point that may have confused you: I wrote

  # ls -l /dev/sequencer

Maybe you thought you should type '#'?

Shell commands don't start with '#'. That character at the start is a
conventional way to indicate that you should be logged in as root -
because usually, '#' is the final character of the shell prompt for
root. Similarly, if I wrote

  $ ls -l /dev/sequencer

The '$' character indicates that you are logged in as a normal user. In
either case, what you actually type is

  ls -l /dev/sequencer

followed, of course, by the return key.

By the way, you should be able to do the above command as a normal user,
but you need to be root to change the permissions:

  # chmod 666 /dev/sequencer


Does that make it any clearer?

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Englewood, Colorado, USA    Horses bear manure through
mgushee at havenrock.com           its fields;
http://www.havenrock.com/   When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)