who is this watchdog? Why does he signal pd from my terminal when pd has been freezing lately? Why can't I connect to jack any longer? stay tuned...

update:

since my last update (natty narwhal w/ ubuntu studio) puredata has been unable to route audio to jack. Midi works fine, but anytime I try to connect to the jack server get:

ostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 2758
Error number -9999 opening portaudio stream
Error message: Unanticipated host error

neat, huh?

item!

see src/s_inter.c:

/* To prevent lockup, we fork off a watchdog process with
higher real-time priority than ours. The GUI has to send
a stream of ping messages to the watchdog THROUGH the Pd
process which has to pick them up from the GUI and forward
them. If any of these things aren't happening the watchdog
starts sending "stop" and "cont" signals to the Pd process
to make it timeshare with the rest of the system. (Version
0.33P2 : if there's no GUI, the watchdog pinging is done
from the scheduler idle routine in this process instead.) */

ciao