Wednesday, December 21, 2005

XMMS lives again!

I got fed up of having no XMMS, so I posted to my local LUG (Linux User Group) mailing list, asking if anybody could suggest ways to find out why XMMS was refusing to start and not even giving an error message.

Back comes the reply: Try using strace

A quick "emerge strace" later, and I take a look at what XMMS gets up to on startup. I then kicked myself for not working it out myself.

XMMS was working for every user account other than me. So it was a file specific to me that was causing the problem, I knew that. But I'd cleared the .xmms directory in my /home and it hadn't helped.

But where else do apps put user-specific files? In /tmp! Duh!

Just as XMMS tried to access the file /tmp/xmms_dominic.0 it locked up. I removed the file, and tried again.

This time, no lockups, no problems: XMMS appeared on my screen. My keyboard controls work flawlessly. GKrellM's XMMSplugin no longer locks it up. Life is good.

And I've discovered a valuable tool. strace is a great little app. . .

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