Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 18:54:28 -0500 From: John Barlow <barlow@starkube.net> To: faber@ISI.EDU, randall@ucsb.edu, chip@chocobo.cx, anarcat@anarcat.ath.cx, john@utzweb.net Cc: freebsd-multimedia <freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: running xmms from cron in FreeBSD Message-ID: <3DDEC3B4.50003@starkube.net>
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Thanks to all who replied and helped me sort this one out. For the
edification of poor souls who may want to run xmms (or any X app) from
cron in the future, I'll summarize your suggestions . . .
1. Tell cron how to find X in the first place by running echo $DISPLAY
in an xterm. Mine reported :0.0, which is pretty typical. I inserted
the following line at the beginning of my crontab:
DISPLAY=:0.0
2. Include the full path to xmms. In my old non-working crontab I had
the following lines:
# wake up with KEXP 0622AM Monday - Friday
22 6 * * 1-5 oenomaus xmms
/usr/home/oenomaus/streams/kexp.pls
I added the path like so . . .
22 6 * * 1-5 oenomaus /usr/X11R6/bin/xmms
/usr/home/oenomaus/streams/kexp.pl
3. It still wasn't working. I then tried leaving out the user
("oenomaus" in this case), and that nailed it - I guess user only needs
to be included when a job needs to be run as someone else. Here's how
the above line looked in the end:
22 6 * * 1-5 /usr/X11R6/bin/xmms
/usr/home/oenomaus/streams/kexp.pl
And voila - I'm on my way to having the streaming jukebox of my dreams.
I can run realplay as well, as long as I have cron do a killall before
switching players so /dev/dsp is available. The only other problem I've
had is that occasionally I get loud white noise instead of my stream. I
think it's a sound card issue, but until I figure it out I can get
around it by opening the stream twice in a row:
22 6 * * 1-5 /usr/X11R6/bin/xmms
/usr/home/oenomaus/streams/kexp.pl && /usr/X11R6/bin/xmms
/usr/home/oenomaus/streams/kexp.pl
a butt-ugly hack, but hey, it works. Thanks again Ted, Randall, Chip,
Anarcat, and John.
Here's a last embarrassing detail: I should have been able to figure
this out myself. About halfway through messing with this last night, I
figured out that cron sends me reports about everything I ask it to do
in my crontab. Next time I have a problem with cron, I'll start with my
system mail.
Best,
John Barlow
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