by wayfarer » Wed Nov 25, 2009 3:47 am
Thanks for the replies, but the sound problems proved to be more than just present in Smokin' Guns. After nearly two weeks of searching and reading tips and tricks for solving the problem, I stumbled upon something myself. To update, I am running Ubuntu 9.10, which included Gnome and the "infamous" pulseaudio sound server. My sound card is of the Sound Blaster persuasion, which has also generated more than a few "tsk, tsk, tsk, poor bastard" comments during my searches. "Web"sters recommended everything from doctoring the system-wide alsa configuration files to uninstalling pulse and ALSA entirely, replacing it with the OSS sound system, or even removing a demonstratedly (I have Smokin' Guns on the Windows system from which I am escaping) healthy 24-bit sound card in favor of an on-board Yamaha sound chipset.
Uhm, thanks, but I'll keep looking...
I did over the period of my search try out perhaps as many as 30 fixes with little and no success, and probably read five+ times that many. Having worked on the Windows end of the computer business since 1.0 debuted about 20 years ago, some of them made sense on a very basic hardware-software-getting-along level, so toward the end of my frustrating experimentation, I focused in on them.
First, for those poor bastards with either a Sound Blaster or pulseaudio or both: fire up Synaptic and download the following:
padevchooser -- to set default servers for pulseaudio and it needs
paman
paprefs
pavucontrol
pavumeter
In the "Sound and Video" folder fire up "Pulse Audio Device Chooser." It will load as an icon in the system tray. Right-click on it and go to preferences and set it to run on system startup. Close that window and left-click on the icon and set the "Default Server" to, imagine, default.
Then open up a terminal and type:
sudo gedit /etc/openal/alsoft.conf
Add the following line directly underneath the "drivers" subsection, so you know what to remove if this does not work for you:
drivers = pulseaudio
I can only claim partial credit of blame for this because some guru suggested just using the word "pulse" for the driver but that did not work
and caused Smokin' Guns to lock up Gnome so tight I had to reboot. That particular guru suggested adding the same thing, using pulse again, to another file and because my tweak worked on the first, I recommend you also do the following:
sudo gedit /etc/libao.conf
Add this line:
default_driver=pulseaudio
This apparently affects those programs that use "libao," and while I saw a brief list of programs that used it, I had none so I hardly paid attention.
Reboot the system and try to run Smokin' Guns without the lines the previous post recommended in an autoexec.cfg. I have duplicated success with this on three separate occasions, myself and two other Ubuntu-Sound Blaster-Pulseaudio sufferers. In each case, all the other files I happened to install in failed attempts at a fix were not part of the formula. What I noted above was.
I only hope this can help someone else.
I am not so confident to mark this thread as SOLVED, but if more than a few people post success stories, someone else can do so for me.
For those of you who do not have success with this, I can give you a list of websites to explore and a few other programs and libraries I installed during what I call the "Soundless Days."
Grinning here, boss...finally.