Comment 42 for bug 274124

Using the patched esdcompat script seemed to do the trick- thanks! I can now play audio through SDL (which I couldn't before).

FWIW - i'm using the automatic login feature of GDM so if that patch was working around a race condition (as it looks) then that might help explain things.

$ lspci | grep audio
00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)

Relevant lines of syslog:

Oct 7 22:15:53 piano pulseaudio[7647]: ltdl-bind-now.c: Failed to find original dlopen loader.
Oct 7 22:15:53 piano pulseaudio[7647]: pid.c: Stale PID file, overwriting.
Oct 7 22:15:53 piano pulseaudio[7647]: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_NICE, (31, 31)) failed: Operation not permitted
Oct 7 22:15:53 piano pulseaudio[7647]: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_RTPRIO, (9, 9)) failed: Operation not permitted
Oct 7 22:15:54 piano pulseaudio[7647]: alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device hw:0: Device or resource busy
Oct 7 22:15:54 piano pulseaudio[7647]: module.c: Failed to load module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: "device_id=0 sink_name=alsa_output.pci_8086_266e_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0"): initialization failed.