wine users - Nov 2011 - No sound in World of Warcraft - intermittant.

At first I thought it was due to running Mangler simultaneously, but recently
we've had no sound in World of Warcraft.

One night when I was setting up to raid that night, I started WoW, and sound
worked fine. I then quit WoW, started Mangler, started WoW, had sound in the
first but not the second. When WoW started this dialogue box popped up saying
that a change in hardware had been detected and asking if I wanted to reset to
default settings - I selected "no".

I then quit WoW, quit Mangler, then restarted just WoW. I got the dialogue box
again, and sound was working once more.

I then quit WoW, and started Mangler then WoW. No dialogue box and sound was
working fine in both.

----

This weekend, my wife and I were playing WoW, and she was on the Linux box, we
hadn't run Mangler at all. She complained that there was no sound. Later
that night I couldn't get sound to work at all. I tried running with Mangler
and without Mangler, I tried rebooting, I even overrode the automatic device
detection in winecfg to select the analogue sound device rather than the digital
one.

Nothing worked.

----

Lastly, I'd just like to say that when I test the sound in winecfg, it
always works fine. I always hear the test sound, regardless of whether Mangler
is running or not, regardless of whether WoW has sound or not, the winecfg
program always plays sound correctly.

So I'd say the problem seems to be that sometimes Wine presents a sound
device to WoW, and sometimes it doesn't. Hence the "hardware
changed" dialogue. I have noticed that a number of times, but since I
don't play on that PC I never really noticed a problem with sound before,
and my wife isn't the complaining sort, so she didn't tell me much
either.

Between crappy graphics, dodgy sound, and difficulty getting the 8 mouse buttons
to work the way they used to, I'm seriously considering going back to
Windows. I really really don't want to, but it's my wife plays on that
computer, not me, and I think she's getting a bit hacked off at how badlyWoW
is running. As I posted in another thread, since I last had Windows running on
there, I have upgraded motherboard, CPU, and RAM significantly, but the graphics
is worse now than it was before, when I feel sure that all the upgrades should
make it much much better. All graphics settings are at the lowest level yet the
game is barely playable, slow and jerky. If I can't get sound to work
reliably soon then I am going to go back to Windows and kiss goodbye to Linux.
Blame the games programmers who only write games for Windows.

Can anyone help?

has anyone else experienced a similar problem?

I noticed in a Google search for solutions that one person posted his Config.WTF
and the sound output device was something other than "System Default".

I'm wondering how WoW treats "System Default" and what Wine
responds with. Can I do something to make sure that this points to the correct
thing, or is the solution to specify something else in Config.WTF, and if so,
what?

I have found that changing the output device from inside WoW causes sound to
turn on - but only temporarily.

Any ideas? Anyone?

I have found (with Ubuntu 11.04) that using other programs simultaneously
sometimes cause troubles with sound, for me particularly Ventrilo may loose
sound and mic when playing WoW. Resetting sound in Ubuntus control panel solves
this problem.

Regarding poor gfx performance: Have you tried the commandline option -opengl,
that made really great improvement for me?

Cheers

Hello again, Dardack.

What is this "alsa duplex that Pulse ran through" and how do I set it
up? What packages do I need to install?


As for same performance in WoW on both Linux and Windows, I remember you saying
that before, but since I have (AFAIK) followed the exact same steps as you, I
don't know why I get such a massive discrepancy. It's bad enough that
WoW doesn't even allow the best graphics levels with OpenGL, the frame rate
sucks even at lowest settings. On Windows with a 32 bit incorrect OS I get
better frame rate at better settings.

The only reason I can think of  is that you are using such massively
over-specced graphics cards that they have processing power to spare in both
Linux and under Windows. As my graphics cards are slightly under-spec, certainly
for the highest levels of quality for graphics, they cope ok with medium quality
levels of graphics under Windows and struggle even at the lowest levels under
Linux. I suspect you are, as it were, over the graphics cap for both Windows and
Linux.

As stated in another thread, it's cheaper to spend ?80 on Windows and get a
big boost in graphics performance than to spend several hundreds of pounds on
new graphics cards.

If you can think of any reason why my graphics performance is so bad, I'd
love to hear it. My setup is:

Kubuntu 10.04 LTS
Running WoW under OpenGL.
No registry edits that I can think of ( I believe I took them all out when they
made no difference).
Proprietary NVidia drivers.

I believe I am running the latest version of Wine from a custom repository, not
the distribution's repository. I looked into building it myself, but had
dependency issues and also there didn't seem tobe much point.

You are awesome.

I am definitely going to give that sound thing one last go, even if just for the
experience, etc. etc.

When your guide says:

    or manually edit the registry of your wineprefix

What is my "wineprefix"? Also when it says:

    WINEPREFIX="your prefix path here" regedit alsareg.reg 

What is my prefix path?

Normally to run Wine's regedit I just type:

    wine regedit

I've never heard of wineprefix, so a little confused.

Very well explained, thanks.

I learn something new from every one of your posts.

Also, we've found that running WoW under Windows 7 is not without its own
problems. The screen size/resolution  keeps self-adjusting to something
pointless - display only - mouseclicks map to the original resolution. It's
easily fixed by jumping to Windows then going back to WoW, but could easily
cause raid wipes, so...

I'm feeling quite depressed by this whole saga. I'm considering getting
an NVIDIA GT440 graphics card (which supports DirectX 11) and is relatively
cheap. The cheapest GTX card I can get is the one I bought two of for my other
PC and costs more than twice as much. Costs are:

NVIDIA GT 440 - ?43
NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti - ?105

That's shopping at the site I get all my computer stuff at. I may be able to
find a different GTX model for cheaper somewhere if I look around hard enough.

A WoW friend I spoke to on Vent last night, who says she "isn't an
expert but knows more about hardware than most people" says that my box
with all new components bar graphics cards is likely to wreck the system. She
claims the stress on the other components of trying to run at their usual speed
when held back by slow graphics cards is likely to cause them to break down. She
used the analogy of a football team with 10 good players and one slacker and how
the 10 good players get worn out trying to compensate for the slacker. I
don't buy it myself. The bus regulates traffic speeds. The interrupts handle
interactions. Voltages are all egulated by the power supply. I just don't
get it. Anyway she recommended replacing the graphics card with a newer model
immediately before my system melts down. I think I have lifetime guarantees on
the RAM and maybe the CPU too, so I'm not too worried.

Anyway, if I do get a new graphics card, I would appreciate your opinion on what
is likely to give me as good performance on Linux as on Windows, decent
performance too, at a budget price.

I think I prefer NVIDIA, possibly ASUS. I've had good results from them in
the past.

On 11/20/2011 08:02 AM, JontomXire wrote:
> Anyway, if I do get a new graphics card, I would appreciate your opinion on
what is likely to give me as good performance on Linux as on Windows

It will be a long time, if ever, for the two to perform the same. Any 
game that uses dx10 or 11 will be missing any features or options that 
require them when playing in Linux because they are not yet supported.

If the bar you have set for games is to play the same as windows, then 
you may be happier in windows for many games. If you are okay with games 
being playable and stable but missing some graphics and are willing to 
track down and deal with problems as wine functionality changes, stick 
with an nvidia card since their linux drivers are still a bit more 
functional than AMDs. My last card purchase I got an nvidia 460 - enough 
card to work well with the rest of my hardware and still be able to do 
dx10 and 11 if/when wine has that option and (at least in my area), a 
budget price card.

I found that "pulseaudio" wasn't even installed, just the client
libraries. So I installed it. Along with it came something called
"pactl" which lists all sinks and sources. When I did this, it listed
all sources and sinks as suspended, and trying to use pactl  to un-suspend them
as per the man page failed silently.

I also found that Mangler stopped working, so ran it with "padsp" for
Pulse OSS emulation (as I read elsewhere) and that got me back to the same
behaviour as previously.

I don't think I have OSS installed, so I'm really not sure how Mangler
worked before.

In summary, I don't really know what sound servers I have installed, what
sound servers I need to have installed, or what basic configuration I probably
ought to have and don't.

I'd appreciate it if you could list me some commands to run to get a full
dump of info that I could then post here so you can see what my system has and
then advise as to what needs to be removed or what commands I might need to run
to get the system into a basic "blank" setup state that I need to be
in before setting up Pulse duplex.

Thanks for all your time and help on this. I really appreciate it.

dardack wrote:
> 
> Now looking at UK websites.  Damn you guys getting ripped off.  Or
> maybe it's shipping.

Shipping is extra :) The UK is one of the most expensive places to live in the
whole world. Check out our fuel prices :(


dardack wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 4:37 AM, JontomXire <wineforum-user at
winehq.org> wrote:
> 
> > I found that "pulseaudio" wasn't even installed, just
the client libraries. So I installed it. Along with it came something called
"pactl" which lists all sinks and sources. When I did this, it listed
all sources and sinks as suspended, and trying to use pactl ?to un-suspend them
as per the man page failed silently.
> > 
> > I also found that Mangler stopped working, so ran it with
"padsp" for Pulse OSS emulation (as I read elsewhere) and that got me
back to the same behaviour as previously.
> > 
> > I don't think I have OSS installed, so I'm really not sure how
Mangler worked before.
> > 
> > In summary, I don't really know what sound servers I have
installed, what sound servers I need to have installed, or what basic
configuration I probably ought to have and don't.
> > 
> > I'd appreciate it if you could list me some commands to run to get
a full dump of info that I could then post here so you can see what my system
has and then advise as to what needs to be removed or what commands I might need
to run to get the system into a basic "blank" setup state that I need
to be in before setting up Pulse duplex.
> > 
> > Thanks for all your time and help on this. I really appreciate it.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> OK I see you use kubuntu, doesn't Pulse come default?  Sorry I only
> use Ubuntu (although I'm prolly gonna drop to Mint or debian as I hate
> Unity).  If it comes default, you may need to start a fresh install.
> I mean as long as you don't have anything set up specific for your
> machine should be easy.  I always partition my drive that 40 gigs for
> OS, rest for /home, this was I can format / to reinstall if needed
> cause I was messing with things so bad.  I like to experiment with
> things, and you can really F up things when you do.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Sincerely,
> 
> MacNean C. Tyrrell

As far as sound stuff goes, I did mess around with it a bit, but then, as far as
I can remember, put it back just the way it was after the install. And I
distinctly remember seeing that the Pulse Audio package (the one with the server
in it) wasn't installed then.

The trouble is that I can't list installed packages by type as far as I can
see. So I don't really know what I have.

As for partitions, I have about 40Gb for OS and then most of the rest for /data
which contains /data/home :) Great minds think alike I guess. I do also have a
huge Windows partition on there too for the same reason.

Is it possible you could make a list of all the packages installed on your
system, filtering out any that are totally irrelevant, and post it here? I know
it's a lot to ask.

As for Ubuntu flavours, all I know is that XUbuntu is supposed to be the cut
down version, minimal desktop, etc. etc. and I used to install that one for
precisely that reason. However as this is the wife's machine I figured
Kubuntu would be more (inexperienced) user friendly and so a better choice.

What exactly are the differences between Ubuntu and Kubuntu?