[TAG] ALSA and Quake2 sound

[Ben Okopnik]

If you've just switched to ALSA, as I have, and are having problems with
sound in Quake2 - mine was cycling on and off at ~1-second intervals -
then don't go cursing ALSA; it's not the culprit. Edit your
~/.quake2/baseq2/config.cfg file, find the line that says

set snddriver "oss"

and replace it with - nope, not "alsa", that driver seems to be broken
in Quake2 - but "sdl", which is what worked for me. The remaining
option, "ao", seems to work fine with regard to sound, but won't let
Quake shut down, which could be considered a problem. :) I figured all
this out (and finally managed to fix it all) when I spotted the
following files in /usr/lib/games/quake2:

snd_alsa.la  snd_alsa.so
snd_ao.la    snd_ao.so
snd_oss.la   snd_oss.so
snd_sdl.la   snd_sdl.so

Since I already knew that "oss" and "alsa" were valid values for
'snddriver', it was a reasonable guess; the reason I'm sending it in as
a 2-cent tip is that the information doesn't seem to be available
anywhere.


* Ben Okopnik * okopnik.freeshell.org * Technical Editor, Linux Gazette *
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