aRts for Debian ships without the SUID bit set on artswrapper, thus
preventing the aRts daemon from running with realtime scheduling
priority, a feature which helps prevent audio skips and jumps.

This restriction is in place due to aRts' unfortunate tendency to
lock the system on exit, when run with realtime priority on systems
with a 2.4 series kernel.

NB: The aKode library, used in conjunction with aRts, dramatically
improves aRts' CPU usage and helps to maintain uninterrupted
playback, often making realtime scheduling unnecessary. To make use
of aKode, simply "apt-get install libarts1-akode-trinity".

Users running other kernels, or simply willing to risk it, can set
SUID on artswrapper, thus enabling the possibility of realtime
scheduling, by running, as root:

dpkg-statoverride --add --update root root 4755 /usr/bin/artswrapper

If this causes problems, the default permissions can be restored by
running, as root:

dpkg-statoverride --remove /usr/bin/artswrapper
chmod 0755 /usr/bin/artswrapper

 -- Christopher Martin <chrsmrtn@debian.org>  Mon,  6 Dec 2004 12:26:16 -0500