Oolite Bulletins

Edit: Sorry, just noticed this is a dev board so maybe not the correct place for this. Sorry. I can post elsewhere if it's not correct

Running Kubuntu 23.10.
Downloaded the tar file from the main website (https://oolite.space/#download). Installed no problem, but there's no sound when running oolite. Logs aren't much help, they just say:
<timestamp>[sound.initialization.error]: Failed to open default sound device
<same timestamp>[sound.init]: Sound system disabled.

Logs are exactly as unhelpful when adding "soundDebug = yes" to whatever file it was.

Ran it using the oolite-wrapper script, which I saw mentioned as a possible fix from an old post, but still same issue.

Downloaded the latest source from git and built it using the instructions and it all works fine (after removing the png header files to fix the no textures problem).

So, for me it's all working, but it's maybe not great to have a stable version with non-working sound on the main page.

Anyone experiencing the same issue and/or knows a fix? I did wonder if it was a missing dependency of some kind, but beyond checking for libopenal (which I think is what handles the sound and is installed) I don't know what to look for. Any ideas?

I installed a fresh instance of Kubuntu 23.10 in a VM, installed Oolite 1.90, and can confirm there was no sound.

After some searching, I found this article: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1284262/default-audio-device-typically-built-in-analog-does-not-show-in-kubuntu-20-10

Instructions are basically to uninstall Pipewire, which, according to the poster, is a bit buggy: And then to install something called pavucontrol After I did that, sound worked correctly in Kubuntu 23.10.

Pipewire is intended to be a good sound server; it should replace PulseAudio; for example, it allows you to enable sound with a high-quality codec via Bluetooth out of the box. But unfortunately, many applications are still a little buggy when working through Pipewire (for example, I was never able to get rid of all the sound artifacts on Kodi), and in this case it is really better to return to PulseAudio.

Hmm, good info. Thanks.

I'm a linux noob so still getting to know it. I'm reasonably sure Pulse audio is my default audio 'thingy' and pavucontrol is already installed, but a quick apt list shows quite a few pipewire packages installed as well.

As I have basically no understanding of how audio works on linux, and I do like to mess about with a few audio programs that are currently working, I'm going to leave it as is and play the build from source that works (except I can't get it to play nice with oolite-starter just yet).

I'll see if I can get some sort of peasant level understanding of how Pulse and Pipewire work and then see about removing pipewire.

Thanks guys.

I have PipeWire running on my laptop, because I want bluetooth with good sound. On a home theater (Debian) PulseAudio (I already said that there were artifacts with sound in Kodi). On the workstation (OpenSuSe) there is also PulseAudio.
AFAIK now most Linux distrs are switching to PipeWire, which “transparently” replaces PulseAudio, and depending on the applications you use, either it works fine, or you have to roll back to PulseAudio, which is still actually available on all distributions. PulseAudio and PipeWire are very powerful things that make it easy to redirect audio not only between different sources and receivers, but also between different machines on the network.

PS pavucontrol - is just PulseAudio Volume Control (mixer) application, it's handy for switching audio between sources and apps.