SD cards & azureus

[Paul A Houle]

         I noticed two glitches in FC5 the other day which strike me as 
strategic issues,  something a little more than I want to pursue 
upstream,  because these are about how applications work together.

* I noticed that Azureus grabs /dev/dsp;  that's really not helpful for an 
application that might run for days or weeks in the background.  It seems 
that Azureus can play
an audio clip when something is done downloading.  My short term answer was 
to have another process grab /dev/dsp while I was starting azureus;  if I 
were going to push
a request upstream,  I'd ask that they only grab /dev/dsp when they are 
playing the tone,  but I don't really know how much flexibility you have 
working with the Java
APIs they use.  In general,  it's part of the "doesn't quite work" audio 
problem that applications don't play nicely together.

* Mounting a secure digital card from my digital camera over a USB 2.0 
connection works beautifully on my FC5 box.  The folder appears on the 
desktop almost instantly,  and downloads and deletions are an order of 
magnitude faster than they are on my mac.  The trouble is when I try to 
unmount -- I'd try to unmount the filesystem by using the right-click in 
Nautilus,  and I'd be told that the filesystem was busy.

          I ran lsof and found that artsd and nautilus were both holding 
onto the filesystem:  I have no idea why artsd was doing that,  but a kill 
-9 took care of that.  That left Nautilus,  and I couldn't,  for the life 
of me,  find a Nautilus window that was open into that 
filesystem,  although I can't prove that one didn't exist.  It seems to me 
that if you try to unmount something in Nautilus,  Nautilus could be smart 
enough to close any windows you have open in the filesystem.  kill -9 fixed 
the problem and let me
do a manual unmount;  Nautilus came back automatically,  but I pity the 
poor newbie who doesn't know how to use lsof,  kill and other useful 
command line tools.