Hi Beartooth,
First of all, let me apologize. I didn't go into *enough* detail. What the strace command does is run another program (the program I referred to as being run "through" strace) and waits for that program to use what are called "system calls" (it doesn't take long!). System-calls are any subroutines provided by the operating system kernel. Activities that use system calls would be things like accessing files, in the case the file (called a UNIX socket) that esd creates to allow other program to access its services (namely, allowing programs to share your sound card [otherwise, only one program at a time can access the sound card, not great in a GUI with possibly multiple programs want to use the sound card at the same time]).
You run programs through strace by including their name after the strace command on the command line, as I showed you earlier ("strace sol"). You will see a lot of (seemingly) goblydygoook stream by in the terminal window. *those* are the system calls I was referring to in the last paragraph.
About setting up ulimit: What I would like to know is if any programs crash. We do this by telling the system to create a "core" file when that happens. Unfortunately, for the past several versions RedHat linuxes have been configured not to create core files. We chnaeg that behaviour by by adding the "ulimit -c unlimited" command at the end of the /etc/profile file. After the line unset pathmunge, should do nicely. OK? I hope this helps clear things up,
-David Chipman
