Need Help With Glest Error

I installed glest for my daughter on her Dell desktop. When I try to run it I get a sound related error that is over my head. This is 10.3 KDE with an AMD/Nvidia MCP51 High Definition sound card. I got it to open once by redoing the sound card in Yast, but after rebooting, it gives the same error that seems to go with the terminal error. Something is keeping the sound card open all the time and won't let glest use it. Can anyone decipher this?

pony@linux:~> glest
open /dev/[sound/]dsp: Device or resource busy
open /dev/[sound/]dsp: Device or resource busy
OpenAL Vendor: Exception: Couldn't open audio device.

Does sound work for any other application run under the same user account?

Yes, everything else works perfectly. I only set up the "pony" account for her. The only other account is root. I haven't tried to open it logged in as root yet, so not sure about that.

I was able to reproduce it by reconfiguring the sound card in Yast, and then opening glest. It opens and plays fine afterwards. When I reconfigure the card it reloads the modules and resets everything, so it is something that is being loaded at boot. Whatever it is, it is keeping control of the sound card, and not letting glest open it. I'm sure it is a glest bug because everything else works. I might try asking on the glest boards.

I checked the glest forums and found a couple of posts with the samr error, but they were for people wanting to use amarok or something similar to play music while playing glest. It said that glest uses openal, and it needs complete control of the sound card while being used. This explains why glest works after reconfiguring the sound card or running alsaconf. Once a reboot is done, the sound modules are reloaded, and have the sound card utilized. This is over my head. Is there an easy cli way to stop the sound modules before opening glest? That would be the easiest way for her to play it if I can't figure out what is causing the conflict.

Hmmm... not sure where to start, as I can run glest without a problem. Some experimentation required

1)Try doing esddsp glest to see if this makes a difference.

2) I'm guessing you are already a member of the audio group, otherwise you wouldn't get any sound as a user. In any case you can check this from the console with groups pony

3) Now I've done a bit of googling with regards to openal and glest, and I found this thread discussing a similar problem, and requiring either /etc/openalrc (if it exists) or ~/.openalrc to be created/edited.

Some additional OpenAL configuration info.

I saw that thread, but missed the "two" openal config files. Her's had a /etc/openalrc file. I created ~/.openalrc, and just copied and pasted the info from the glest forum. It opens now, but the sound is choppy. I will try tweaking it tomorrow. The sample rate looks a little high. Thank you very much for pointing out what I had missed earlier. I had resorted to reading alsa/openal configurations on the Gentoo wiki.

Good to see some progress. Keep us posted.