I have this working well enough for my purposes now. I thought I was missing some entry in a config file somewhere, that would start up the esound daemon for me. Not so. The esd has an "auto-spawn" feature where it starts up when it is needed, and the Gnome desktop uses that to get it going.
As I said earlier, I could manually start the daemon. I tried it again, this time making sure I was not logged in as root; aha! I could not manually start the daemon. Since the Gnome desktop logs in as me and not as root, the problem became clear. The error message was that the daemon could not open /dev/dsp. I ran "ls -l /dev/dsp" and saw that there was no read/write permission for ordinary users, so I used "chmod a+rw /dev/dsp" and now my Gnome desktop starts up esd just fine. There still is one issue: if I log out and log in again as another user, esd does not get killed by the first user's logout and then started up again by the second user. The second user was then not able to connect to esd. I kludged a solution by copying the .esd-auth file from the first user to the second user; now either user can use esd when it is started by the other user. I'm not certain whether this is the correct long-term solution, but I'm running and right now that's all I care about. (Maybe it *is* the correct long-term solution: the .esd-auth file reminds me of the way X handles authorization... I must study this more.) -- Steve R. Hastings "Vita est" [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
