Yak Shaving

Its nasty I know but sometimes I lose sound normally after Firefox gets in a twist with a Flash video. To fix it and to check thats the problem run:

channam@tomservo:~$ sudo lsof | grep pcm
[sudo] password for channam:
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon file system /home/channam/.gvfs
      Output information may be incomplete.
pulseaudi  5727    channam  mem       CHR      116,8               12971 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
pulseaudi  5727    channam   39u      CHR      116,8               12971 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
firefox    5917    channam  mem       REG        8,1    22052     670628 /usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so

The last line above shows Firefox holding open some Alsa lib. At this point all Firefox windows are shut. We now know Firefox hasn’t closed correctly. So to make sure it dies:

channam@tomservo:~$ kill -9 5917
channam@tomservo:~$ sudo lsof | grep pcm
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon file system /home/channam/.gvfs
      Output information may be incomplete.
pulseaudi  5727    channam  mem       CHR      116,8               12971 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
pulseaudi  5727    channam   39u      CHR      116,8               12971 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p

Restart Firefox and should be well again until next time…