[Wine] Steam sound problem

[Reece Dunn]

2009/10/31 phodd.net <wineforum-user at winehq.org>:
> I seem to be having the exact same problem getting sound working under Wine.
>
> I'm using a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 and Wine 1.1.31 (which is the latest version available via the Synaptic Package Manager).
>
> Following the 'disable Pulseaudio' advice in this thread and elsewhere online does more harm than good in that it totally stops all Ubuntu sound output (Other people's mileage may vary of course - I can only test my own computer, but there doesn't seem to be another sound subsystem installed by default that would take over when Pulse is killed.)

My experience is the same also. The Sound preference reports that it
is waiting for the sound system to respond (presumably pulseaudio);
the keyboard volume control isn't working properly -- I have to use
alsamixer in this case.

Alsa is installed, and does work when pulse is gone (although Ubuntu
doesn't integrate well anymore with alsa, as it has a hard dependency
on pulseaudio that is increasing over time).

> All this bang-head-against-brick-wall-until-dead-or-everything-works malarkey is fairly new to me, but I'll report back if I stumble blindly onto something that fixes it.
>
> ... and I know this is probably not the place to gripe. It seems to be Ubuntu that have moved the goalposts on this one, not WineHQ :(

Tracking the pulseaudio mailing list and blog, it appears that Ubuntu
9.10 has not configured pulseaudio properly (it requires a kernel
patch for rtkit that is available in Fedora and some other bits and
pieces). From the looks of it, we may have to wait for the Lucid
release to fix pulseaudio; I'm not sure if they'll backport the fixes
to Karmic.

Another thing I would like is for ossp to be enabled, so OSS-based
components will work (which may fix sound dropping out in Flash).

Does anyone know if the sound issues are now specific to Ubuntu, or
whether there are issues in Fedora (where, apparently they have got
pulseaudio configured correctly)?

It's annoying, because aside from sound (which is largely working),
Karmic is a very good release.

- Reece