Comment 6 for bug 13910

(In reply to comment #5)
> They've already been discussed elsewhere; you should be able to find some closed
> bugs in Bugzilla and transfer the information here.
>
> Wrapper scripts using esddsp are often a reasonable approach, but this is a
> fragile hack, and would need to be implemented by the vendors of the proprietary
> software

https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5696

OK, that's that, then. Won't fix. This question will come up repeatedly on the
user forum, so I'll continue to run auto_spawn=1 as an experiment and see what
bad things happen, at least for me. I'm at work now and can't check
.xsession_errors, but it seems from the previous bug that I may find errors in
there.

I'm not trying to be difficult -- there are real occassions when users need to
run non-free. I'm a news wire editor in the U.K. and listening to BBC Radio 4 is
a must, at least when I get up (around 5am) and the computer is the most
convenient. I also have a mixed network at home with Windows, Ubuntu and Mac
OSX, plus some seriously clueless relatives all over the world. Skype, non-free
as it is, is currently the best and easiest solution.

On the plus side, these applications appeared to work correctly on polypaudio,
albiet with the other problems that have led to the decision to revert to esound.