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List:       freedesktop-xorg
Subject:    Bell notifications stop being reported in Fedora 14 Xorg server 1.9.4
From:       Davide Bolcioni <davide_bolcioni () yahoo ! it>
Date:       2011-03-30 11:20:57
Message-ID: 250272.94559.qm () web28611 ! mail ! ukl ! yahoo ! com
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Greetings,
this is my first post on this list so I hope this is the right place for reporting \
the problem.

First, a bit about context: a Fedora 14 installation is used as the X terminal for a \
legacy industrial control application running on old Solaris servers.

The application uses a mix of raw Xlib calls and early Motif code. It crashes if no \
PseudoColor visual can be found, and for reasons far above my head must not ever be \
modified.

I have been providing ad-hoc support for the beast using slightly modified installs \
or Live CDs of Fedora for some time now, but now I am facing a thorny problem with \
the bell.

Fedora was chosen in the hope that support for graphics adapters would be fairly up \
to date within the framework of a standard X11 setup, since procurement rules here \
say that I can ask for a box and get an "equivalent" box with totally different \
hardware if the purchasing department feels like it. 

I know about Wayland, but that's a different story.

The legacy application, it turns out, also uses the X bell, and the Xkb extension, as \
a means to alert the operator to various conditions of varying degrees of \
significance.

In this context, I wrote a small C program which listens for bell notifications and, \
upon receiving one, forks to play a sine wave of the given pitch and duration using \
PulseAudio, since its introduction apparently caused this behavior to disappear from \
Fedora, especially the live variants.

Neither that listener nor the legacy application let go of their X11 connection. In \
the case of the listener, I have been killing and restarting it periodically in an \
attempt to work around the problem and also to handle the cause of PulseAudio exiting \
for no reason I could discern.

No matter what I try, after a time between about 29 and 43 hours the listener stops \
receiving bell notifications although the legacy application is still running \
happily.

Firing up an xterm which runs a shell script echoing a bunch of BELs results in the \
appropriate cacophony. Every time.

Restarting the legacy application, which I can confirm closes the X11 connection, \
does not help. Notice that the application consists of an active instance on a server \
and a standby instance on a twin, each with its own X11 connection, so it is possible \
to terminate each in turn without disrupting anything.

I am not sure I ever terminated them both, as this would disrupt service, but I am \
going to explicitly try in a week or so.

Restarting PulseAudio does not help (just in case).

Restarting the listener does not help, nor apparently does it impact the interval \
between occurrences of the problem.

Does the above ring a bell (pun intended), anyone ?

Thank you in advance,
Davide Bolcioni
-- 
There is no place like /home.


      
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