Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty OpenAL and how it almost ruined Puzzle Pirates

I'm going to be upfront about this. I play Puzzle Pirates. Now you know why this blog is anonymous.

One interesting thing about the game is that it uses LWJGL for its Linux implementation, something I consider an important fact.

A while ago I grabbed Puzzle Pirates, and it worked immediately (on Linux!). Except for sound. Sound is not a big deal in that game, but it kept eating away at me. A couple of days spent posting on the Puzzle Pirates boards netted me the location of the game's log file. Then my mind pieced it all together.

LWJGL uses OpenAL for sound! So the whole setup goes something like Puzzle Pirates -> LWJGL -> OpenAL -> Operating system sound system (ALSA or in my case pulse audio).

My bundled OpenAL drivers were 32 bit, NOT 64 bit. I am running the 64 bit version of Jaunty. So I pulled up the Synaptic Package Manager application, and did a search for OpenAl (libopenal), installed the package, and lo and behold sound was working.

Every single application that uses LWJGL potentially won't work, I hope Canonical does a better job packaging in the future.