[Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

My N900 is running a bit lumpy since yesterday:

• Media Player won't play any files ("file format not supported")
• Camera and Flashlight won't start ("used by another program")
• Volume button does nothing
• Pulseaudio has cpu usage of 30%, Hildon status menu 50% - both go back to normal when i disable the volume slider in the status menu

These malfunctions occur since a reboot after

• adding the repository for the Maemo SDK and installing gcc and pkg-config
• installing orecchiette 0.3
• installing media-im-status-updater 0.4

I have no idea how to investigate this issue and much less how to fix it. Any idea or all-in-one-click solution?

Re: [Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

The only thing from your list I do NOT have is the media-whatever-updater and I am not experiencing any of your problems. Could that be a hint?

Re: [Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

Ack! I'm not sure if all of this is caused by orecchiette, but now that I think about it, it's using the same code for managing video input that I was using earlier this year -- and that code shuts down the camera app while the program is running. :( Not something that orecchiette needs to do... Let me fix that.

Re: [Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

I didn't mention I uninstalled all these packages again, but that didn't help.

Re: [Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

Hmm. Ok, so if Camera and Flashlight are complaining "used by another program", maybe a list of the running programs could be of use? For example, the output of "top" (or even a full "ps", if you're willing to wade through it all) in the terminal could show some abnormal processes...

Re: [Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

I noticed another strange behaviour:
When opening /home/user/ in hamsterfiler the directory is being updated about every second. Other directories are displayed without such flickering.

Re: [Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

top, powertop/zzztop and maybe dmesg output would be the place to start.

Re: [Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

Something is continuously writing to that directory. Use 'top' as Copernicus suggested and/or 'lsof'.

Re: [Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

That was pulseaudio, writing its cookie (I just found out). I commented out "respawn" in /etc/event.d/pulseaudio and killed the process. It didn't help anything else. No camera and no flashlight (no media playing in this case of course).

Re: [Help Please] No media playing, no camera, no flashlight
 

It happened exactly the same with my spare N900 last week. Tried searching for a fix and i thought that was one of those weird hildon bugs but since it was my second device i've decided to reflash it. The only processes that seemed abnormal (at least that i could identify) were pulseaudio and hildon-status-menu. They both were crazy. Reboot didn't help. The only thing that i remember to install before was sshfs and the problem started right after mounting my work's box /home. Uninstalling sshfs didn't help too. Sorry. At least if i knew that i wasn't alone i'd have tried to help debuging it.