Hi,
I was trying to use SDL-1.2.4 with the esd daemon that comes with Gnome 1.4 ,
locally.
After setting the ESPEAKER envar i still couldnt get the audio from an SDL app
to go thru esd. SDL seems to only load the esd driver if ESPEAKER is set, but
if you set it the libesd (that comes with gnome1.4) trys a TCP connection to esd,
instead of a UNIX socket connection to /tmp/.esd/socket (the default way esd is set
up under gnome.) I think that they now use the DISPLAY envar now to see if a tcp
connection is needed and ESPEAKER overrides this.
So in SDL_audio.c I changed line 263 and commented out the envar being set if
statement:
if ( (driver_name == NULL) /&& (getenv(“ESPEAKER”) != NULL)/ ) {
/* Ahem, we know that if ESPEAKER is set, user probably wants
to use ESD, but don’t start it if it’s not already running.
This probably isn’t the place to do this, but… Shh! 
*/
…load esd
}
and it now uses esd ok, and seems to default back to /dev/dsp when
esd is not running…
Tim