So the next item on the upgrade list is to get sound and wine to work. Yes – I’m kind of addicted to EVE Online and i have to get that work.

In the old system I had pulseaudio to work. I really like that as it handles multiple input and outputs and you can even adjust volumes and individual applications. So its a really god system. In the old system (8.04) it worked very well, but tended to hang some times, and I had to kill the pulseaudion daemon and restart it from time to time.

In 9.10 pulseaudion is the default use and I like that. Its very stable and works well. Unfortunately some applications is not OK with pulseaudio and there is some problems getting them to work.

Things that works well is:

• System sounds
• Skype – latest version 2.1.0.81 has pulseaudio support
• Audacity audion editor works now well with pulse
• Flash via Chrome or Firefox works ok
• Virtualbox works very well

Not working:

• Realaudio player
• IP Telephone – ekiga can work by using the headset without pulseaudio
• VMWare – but im not using sound there
• Wine out of the box

So most is working but I need to get wine working.

I hate the fact that when you go out and surf for a problem with any application and pulseaudion the top 10 things you get is “Oh i solved the problem by uninstalling pulseaudio and now everything is working”. That is not a solution for me. I want pulseaudion to be able to handle multiple streams and so on and going back to an older system is a bit backwards in my opinion. Fix the bugs and get the new things to work instead.

In the old system I had wine working with padsp – the pulseaudion OSS wrapper. And it was working well. But in this new OS its not working well at all. 🙁

After googeling and checking I found the Winepulse project. Apparently someone in Canada did make a sound backend for wine that can talk to the pulseaudio server. Unfortunately it will not be included in the normal wine as the wine people are rewriting wine to use OpenAL and that has pulseaudio build in so it will be available when that is in. When that now will happen.

So in the mean time you have to use winepulse patch or download from their archive.

So did it work – YES – perfectly and without any problem.

So what did I do.

• First i removed the old wine installation.
• Then i disabled the winehw archine from the source list
• And added Neil Wilson’s PPA: https://launchpad.net/~neil-aldur/+archive/ppa
• And installed the wine1.2 – 1.1.31.oubuntu+winepulse0.33 package

And now I happily can play my eve. Almost!!!

There is a bug in the ubuntu kernel that apparently locks up eve when you start it up. There are some fixes but I changed the start-up icon to do this instead of  anything else. What is does is change the bitsCancelled=1 to bitsCanccelled=0 in the prefs.ini file before starting up eve. And this works 95% of all cases.

It shuld be all on one line. And if you have multiple start-up for different clients you need to change them to. Don’t forget to change the xxx to you home directory.

There are a few times when the startup dont work for me. By doing a wineboot -k command and then start again usually works then.

Now I can play eve as I whant.