Xmbc blocks sound card with alsa

[structor]

Can anybody help me out? I want to run a virtualbox machine on my xmbc ion330 machine and want to use sound.

On the commandline I can play sounds when xbmc is stopped, but as soon as it is enabled it stops working. The error message i get is "Playback open error: Device or resource busy".

I have googled around and found that:
ipc_key 1024
ipc_key_add_uid false
ipc_perm 0660
should help, but in my case it does nothing. I found somewhere that if you configure alsa system wide it should also help, so moved the content of my .asoundrc to /etc/asound.conf. Also not getting me any further. Any linux guru around that can help me further with alsa configuration?

The thing i am trying to accomplish is to run my home automation server in a virtual box environment and to get it to play notification sounds. I have also looked for a work around, i thought that if xbmc could play my sounds basically the problem of blocking the device is also effectively gone . However in the json rpc specification i can only find the notification command, which pops up ui notifications, which is also usefull but not what i want now. So if anybody knows how the play a sound using the json rpc specificiation, without stopping music / movie playback I would also be helped.

As a last question is anybody else integrating XBMC in their home automation software?

[Snelvuur]

I do have xbmc running, but no integration at all. I dont want to use anything else om my ion330 besides xbmc though, since playing high ress 1080p content will take its toll on the box (and xbmc changes frequently, so just a reinstall happens more often)

There are some nice "touch" interfaces for the web out there for xbmc which you can then use with a ipad/homeseer (hstouch) integration.

[structor]

I do have xbmc running, but no integration at all. I dont want to use anything else om my ion330 besides xbmc though, since playing high ress 1080p content will take its toll on the box (and xbmc changes frequently, so just a reinstall happens more often)

There are some nice "touch" interfaces for the web out there for xbmc which you can then use with a ipad/homeseer (hstouch) integration.

I have been running an apache server running two websites, gitolite and some other stuff besides xbmc. That was without any kind of problems.

The reinstall part is indeed the reason that i want to move my domotica stuff to a virtual machine. I have been running my backend in a virtualbox and it's taking 20% of the the 4 cpu's listed. So that's plenty horsepower left for playing movie content... The only time I have seen xbmc take more then 15% when the nvidia installation got fubared by apt-upgrading..

Are you running xmbc-freak's install?

As for the integration part currently I have nothing integrated. I use the ipad / android remotes available in the markets. I do however have a virtual device which acts as a security sensor, which polls sabnzbd. I have the vague idea of unmounting disks when I am not watching movies and not downloading. After that I could remove the power from the virtual disks to lower power consumption. But that's only working in my head as of now

[Snelvuur]

I run xbmcfreak version too (i actually host all his iso's) but i dont want a big pc next to my t.v. so it had to be a small form factor.
It is easy to make http calls in hstouch and control xbmc but you want to have pictures from your library for example too, which makes it harder.

I have my mediacenter/tv setup so that if i dont watch anything it will all just shutdown automaticly. The t.v. will shutdown after xx minutes of no activity and when it does it will shutdown the receiver too (goes over hdmi) pretty nice these days. Xbmc has that timeout too.