acroread, your new multimedia application
I had this problem lately, that sometimes sound just stopped working. This is not related to the previous incident - I checked that first… but I was to find another surprise this time..
Turns out Acrobat Reader was to blame for this one:
# lsof /dev/snd/pcm* COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME firefox-b 17368 tigert mem CHR 116,11 8338 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p acroread 21635 tigert 147u CHR 116,11 8338 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
What the Fsck?? Last I checked, “Acroread” was a tool to view PDF files. Why does it block the audio device when nothing is even being played..?
(for an added shock, if you are an interaction designer or involved in usability, check out the acroread preferences, if you haven’t for a while.. they have 21 pages of settings.. but that’s another story..)
October 23rd, 2006 at 01:51
> they have 21 pages of settings
Konqueror still wins
October 23rd, 2006 at 04:07
Acrobat 7 Standard/Professional (not Reader) on Mac OS X fires up a copy of MySQL when you start it. If that’s not bad enough, it sometimes doesn’t kill it when you quit Acrobat. Grrrrrr.
October 23rd, 2006 at 05:45
Compare it to evince which has zero preferences tabs.
God I love GNOME so much.
October 23rd, 2006 at 05:53
I hope they upgrade to using gstreamer soon.
October 23rd, 2006 at 08:43
WOW. Are people even using acroread? I wondered what the hell it was doing in the ubuntu-repos, when the default installed pdf-reader words fine.
At least I now have an explanation why it launches so slowly on Windows. I used to think they were just delaying the boot time to impress the end-user wonder what a marvelous and complicated piece of technology it must require to view a PDF file.
October 23rd, 2006 at 09:47
Adobe Acrobat Reader has a `Read Out Loud’ feature. Maybe that was blocking the audio device?
Either way evince beats Adobe Reader hand down in most cases.
October 23rd, 2006 at 09:58
I don’t see what’s exactly wrong about the 21 pages of settings.. they seem fairly well laid out and it’s more or less clear what they do. IMO, it’s better than having few options accessible to the user, with the rest hidden away in a config file or gconf, or even only accessible via command line options…
October 23rd, 2006 at 12:59
There are things like “[x] Allow speculative downloading in the background” - I don’t have any clue as what those do… The Preview.app in Mac OS X does not have this kind of settings mess and yet it is very useful and handy.
The reason I use acroread is that it renders some things a lot nicer than Evince, even though I would love the simplicity of the Gnome viewer. And on Ubuntu, “poppler” library (that renders the pdf’s for Evince) is not compiled with Cairo, so vector art is not antialiased even. It makes viewing things like vector maps etc pretty much unreadable.
October 23rd, 2006 at 14:58
unfortunately, acrobat reader is the only application on linux that can display complex pages decently without jagged edges or part of the text gone…
October 26th, 2006 at 00:54
Yeah. That’s why I use it too.
It’s funny though - yesterday I had the same problem with sound, and now Evince was blocking it.. D’oh. I guess that makes them even
Maybe this has something to do with the gtk event sounds? I had them turned off though, which is strange..
October 26th, 2006 at 15:51
Heh, I just had the same thing with file-roller in Ubuntu Edgy of all applications (remembered this post and went back to it to see what that lsof command was). Really weird, why would an archive-opening application block sound…?
November 2nd, 2006 at 15:51
“unfortunately, acrobat reader is the only application on linux that can display complex pages decently without jagged edges or part of the text gone…” it is absolutly true , ‘cos i have the same problem under Linux redhat