[clug] karmic problems with sound in MMORPG games.

[Wesley Bruce]

There are only a few top class games, ie MMORPG games, that are Linux
compatible. Second life via snowglobe, planeshift and worldforge. Most
other games are clones or copies of windows games or games that are 5 or
more years old. If Linux is to keep up with or even replace Microsoft it
needs to track these games and stay compatible with them. Karmic seems
to have failed here. There are to many versions of Linux for the games
to track to, it seems, causing a compatibility lag with the game design
and maintenance teams. The lags getting longer. As you will notice
Karmic has fewer games than Jaunty had.
Both second life and planeshift have a sound glitch in karmic that was
not in jaunty. Karmic lacks sound related software these games want.
There are solutions discussed in the link below but the instructions are
chaotic at best and unintelligible to someone who still cant figure out
the terminal. I.e. all  6 billion non programmers. 
http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1322639&page=3

Can someone convert this solution into a package that finds the missing
sound stuff and or modifies both packages and automatically installs
them on the computer so that those of us that regularly end up swearing
at the terminal can install the thing. Ideally it needs to be included
in the ubuntu software center games system as a MMO support package.
That makes it a three click job to get it done with out seeing any *%^^#
$#^ terminal and its unintelligible language.  it also means people can
up date the package which is tied to the Linux flavour rather than track
80+ Linux flavours. 

Yes I know the game creators are working on the problem in both cases
but it would not be a problem if Karmic had tracked these games and
taken them seriously and checked the consequences of deleting the key
sound software that these games and I suspect many other programs use. 
Microsoft rules the world for a good reason. It creates programs that
track to the needs of the million or so game designers out there knowing
that that drives PC computer choice. They devise pop-ups, menus, read
me's and installation packages that assume you know nothing and are
right. 90% of us don't know what garbage like this means.
  $
mv /path/to/secondlife/lib/libopenal.so.1 /path/to/secondlife/lib/libopenal.so.1.old

And I've come up with the message "mv: cannot stat
'/path/to/secondlife/lib/libopenal.so.1': No such file or directory"

Note I did not get this message; its from the above site. I didn't get
as far as he did and I have no idea why. That's the problem.  

Games might sound trivial but some of us use second life and other game
worlds for some serious stuff. I'm looking at in-game advertising in
MMORPG games.  With TV and old media dieing the first person to crack
ads in games particularly MMO makes big money. Its an interesting
challenge and you must admit if Linux based games had an advertising
revenue stream you'd be getting paid to write Linux software right now.
Dot communism doesn't put food on the table or result in same day
service.