progress of sound update -- REVISED

[Susan Cragin]

Yesterday's Ubuntu updates produced a rash of pulseaudio changes, and suddenly alsa works with wine, without stumbling.
Today's secret to making it work:
In System/Preferences/Startup applications, uncheck pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound
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Why do you need to install esound?

I don't know. I've taken it for granted that some kind of mixer is needed. Perhaps because I don't use the default sound card, the on-board card. Maybe I don't need esound at all. Or maybe if I could permanently make my Creative X-fi card the default. Right now, to do that, I have to revert back to the alsa-utils from Jaunty and use asoundconf set-default-card. (The newest alsa-utils does not include this handy tool.) 
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sudo nano /etc/pulse/client.conf
autospawn = no
Then every time your computer starts, run killall pulseaudio in terminal first.
(Because the Startup Applications menu doesn't really work.)

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Painful bug in Ubuntu. Yet another reason why I stay away from it at
all costs :)

What do you use?

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I trained and ran Dragon NaturallySpeaking without a problem.

Excellent news!

Yeah. I read somewhere that Ubuntu has made pulseaudio removable partly because of this very program, which of course is a great assistance to people with mild RSI, who can use a keyboard for some things, but tire easily when entering large amounts of text.