Second Life Crashing in Karmic

[RabidWeezle]

Trying different drivers in the secondlife script, (using snowglobe) so far no dice, will keep trying...

I made a video on youtube showing the outputs going batty on karmic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FopDUiJjjDE

Got it working:
gedit /path/to/snowglobe (or whatever client you use)

uncomment the line to disable openal:

export LL_BAD_OPENAL_DRIVER=x

[Naiki Muliaina]

Ooo cool ty!

Cant check it right now, doing a run of stand up comedy around SL, but ty, will check it when im done

[RabidWeezle]

Ooo cool ty!

Cant check it right now, doing a run of stand up comedy around SL, but ty, will check it when im done

just found a better fix even, make a ~/.openalrc and stick in it:

(define devices '(alsa))
(define alsa-device "pulse")

---EDIT scratch that, this doesn't work

[VertexPusher]

But according to the pulseaudio guys it's not so much to be blamed on pulseaudio but ubuntu's dodgy implimentation of it.

If that was true, Fedora's implementation should be much better because it is maintained by the PulseAudio guys themselves. But Fedora users are reporting the same sound issues as everyone else. Check out their forums.

[Naiki Muliaina]

gedit /path/to/snowglobe (or whatever client you use)

uncomment the line to disable openal:

export LL_BAD_OPENAL_DRIVER=x

This one works fine for me, turns of music media, but faaaar better than crashing all the time ^^

[VertexPusher]

If you remove Pulse, the crashes will stop too, but you will keep media playback.

[RabidWeezle]

with all gstreamer/vlc/mplayer stuff installed, I still get streaming music in snowglobe with pulse

[Naiki Muliaina]

Hmm gonna have to have another poke at it tonight... Thankies again for the replys

[logomancer]

Switching to FMOD (what uncommenting that line does) does not work for me; I get no sound at all.

My issue is similar -- CPU usage jumped significantly after I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10. I started hearing distorted sound, and then no sound at all after a few minutes. Renaming /path/to/SL/lib/libopenal.so.1 to something else extended the time, but entering an area with a lot of avatars caused the CPU to spike again. Enabling voice seems to make things worse.

I am, frankly, at a loss as to what to do about this. I would guess that the problem lies in how SL (and the Vivox voice binary) uses OpenAL and/or pulseaudio. However, lacking sufficient knowledge of OpenAL and the SL codebase, I have no idea how to fix it.

[logomancer]

As it happens, there is a fix for the behavior I presented in my last post.

The problem lies with the OpenAL library included with the official SL viewer; it is quite old, and has limited Pulseaudio support. Removing or renaming the included library -- thus forcing SL to use libopenal 1.8.466, which is included with Ubuntu -- is somewhat of an improvement. Even with this method, issues still exist with the voice client, including increased CPU usage and outgoing voice transmissions having a sped-up "chipmunk" quality to them. From this post, it seems that there was a bug in libopenal 1.8.466 that caused this to happen. It has been fixed in later versions, but they have not been included by default in Ubuntu 9.10.

So, in order to fix the SL issues, we need a newer version of libopenal. Fortunately, this is quite possible by compiling a new version from source provided on the OpenAL website.

First, we need to satisfy dependencies. Type the following command into a terminal:

$ sudo aptitude install cmake libasound2-dev libpulse-dev

Next, we need to download the latest source release from the OpenAL website. As of this post, it was 1.10.622:

$ wget http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal-releases/openal-soft-1.10.622.tar.bz2

Extract the bzipped tar file:

$ tar xvjf openal-soft-1.10.622.tar.bz2

Change to the build directory you just made:

$ cd openal-soft-1.10.622/build

Run CMake to configure the makefiles:

$ cmake ..

Note: At this point, there should be some text here, and at the end should be something like this:

-- Building OpenAL with support for the following backends:
--      ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio, WaveFile

Make sure that ALSA and PulseAudio show up there. If you didn't, it means you didn't install the dependencies properly; execute the first command of this HOWTO and try again.

After that, make the package:

$ make

If all goes well, you should have libopenal.so.1.10.622 in the directory. Rename the old libopenal in the SL viewer directory:

$ mv /path/to/secondlife/lib/libopenal.so.1 /path/to/secondlife/lib/libopenal.so.1.old

And replace it with the new one:

$ cp libopenal.so.1.10.622 /path/to/secondlife/lib/libopenal.so.1

You're done!