> Specifically, RealPlayer on PowerPC does not appear to have any problem
> with pipes.  I'm running it with a hacked set of emulators/suse_* pkgs,
> and what I find is that it starts up, plays a clip just fine, and then
> generally segfaults afterwards.  Sometimes it also segfaults trying to
> start up, but not nearly as often.  I don't believe this effect is
> caused by pipe semantics.

It seems the problem is more general than just pipes. We have the same
with UNIX domain sockets, and I would not be surprised to discover the
same kind of problems when writing to an audio device. But remember I
said "probably". I'm not sure about that one.

For Opera, it works if you uncheck asynchronous DNS. Maybe we have a
similar problem with INT sockets, I don't know, but the problem is
general enough to cause a lot of bugs.

Anyway, fighting on "this won't work" theme is time lossage. I'm going
to try a fix, and we'll know if I'm right or not about RealPlayer.

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus.  
Pas de processeur Intel, pas de logiciels Microsoft:
Des programmes sains dans un ordinateur sain.
p99dreyf@criens.u-psud.fr