Ubuntu 8.04 - Play Broken

• Home
• About
• Calendar
• How Tos
• Blogs
• Articles
• Forums
• News
• Site Map

I recently upgraded a couple PCs from 7.10 to 8.04 "Hardy Heron". Even though the new release came out over two months ago, I ran the upgrades Wed Jun 18. I usually hold back on distribution upgrades so that the patches can catch up - not a real big fan of bugs - maybe this time I didn't wait long enough.

So, I just ran across a small piece of bleeding edge brokenness, even after a pretty extensive pile of critical patches [to "Hardy Heron"].

My mother-in-law just informed me that her audio reminders were no longer telling her when it was time for her breathing treatments, she was still seeing the visual ones but not the accompanying audio reminders.
I had set these up using crontab:

0 09 * * * /usr/bin/play /home/marge/reminder.wav
1 09 * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 xmessage "Time for your breathing treatment"
0 15 * * * /usr/bin/play /home/marge/reminder.wav
1 15 * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 xmessage "Time for your breathing treatment"
0 21 * * * /usr/bin/play /home/marge/reminder.wav
1 21 * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 xmessage "Time for your breathing treatment"
0 08 27 6 wed DISPLAY=:0.0 xmessage "Watch for UPS delivery"

The good news is, the solution was only a google search away - "play soxio: Failed reading".
The very first hit revealed a link to discussions that indicated the need to install additional packages:
libsox-fmt-base libsox-fmt-ffmpeg libsox-fmt-flac libsox-fmt-gsm libsox-fmt-mp3 libsox-fmt-ogg libsox-fmt-sndfile libsox-fmt-alsa libsox-fmt-ao libsox-fmt-oss libsox-fmt-all

Only one single command will install all of them:

So; Not a BIG deal, but, it seems that "Hardy Heron" is not so Hardy.

I think this is why one good friend of mine says he uses Debian "sarge" rather than Ubuntu, it's cutting edge vs bleeding edge. (Stack, correct me if I'm quoting you wrong.)

To those that might take offense, I assure you, I only pick on Ubuntu in jest - Bleeding Edge and Cutting edge are both great places to be, our most valuable pioneers ride the wave of the future on the Bleeding Edge, while others take a nice smooth ride on the Cutting Edge of stable release and even though I'm very fond of Slackware, I do venture out on the Bleeding Edge every chance I get.

BTW, has anyone tried one of the new Debian Live CDs?: http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/

Registered Linux User 188099 <>< Back to Site Blogs