Ubuntu
atanks package

Sound doesn't work in Atanks on Ubuntu

Asked by jessesmith

I'm the upstream developer of Atomic Tanks (atanks) and I keep getting reports that sound doesn't work with Atanks on Ubuntu. For some reason this problem has (to the best of my knowledge) only appeared on Ubuntu and its child distributions.

The cause appears to be that Atanks (which uses the Allegro library for sound) isn't able to use its default sound driver. Switching to a different Allegro-supported sound driver, such as OSS, fixes the problem. At first I suspected a problem with Pulse Audio, but other Pulse distributions (such as Fedora) are able to run Atanks with sound enabled without problems.

Upstream, we've added a menu option which allows users to select their sound driver. So if the default doesn't work, they can move to OSS, or whichever they prefer.

As I see it, this menu option is really just a work around to the problem. What I'd really like to do is work with the Ubuntu maintainer(s) to create a fix at compile time so that the end-users don't need to trouble themselves getting it working. It's become a common issue on our forum and I'd like to solve this issue in the background to save users the hassle.

Perhaps we could get a patch in Ubuntu's atanks makefile that would step around the issue without affecting users on other distros.

Please feel free to contact me via e-mail at jessefrgsmith AT yahoo DOT ca, or visit the Atanks forum at http://atanks.forumwise.com to discuss the issue. Thank you.

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George Standish (george-standish-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#1

Jesse,

I certainly don't have any insights into why sound is not working on atanks.

I would like you to know the issue does still exists in Lucid Lynx (10.04) and I have included myself as being affected by https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/atanks/+bug/385406

Good luck,
George

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jessesmith (jessefrgsmith) said : 		#2

Thanks for the reply George. I'm not sure if 10.04 is affected or not, the newest version I've received a bug report for (and confirmed) is 9.10. When 10.04 hits final, I'll be happy to test it to see if we still run into the problem. If it still crops up, I'd like to put a patch in Atanks that reads something like

ifdef Ubuntu
use oss sound driver
else
use default

Then we could define Ubuntu in the downstream makefile without interfering with users on other distros. On the other hand, if the sound issue disappears in 10.04, then we can all just be happy.

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