[Newbies] Guidance on squeak (trunk) plugins on Ubuntu. Or: how do you get beeper to beep?

[Jerome Peace]

I am using squeak on Ubuntu. Actually I find my self hearding mice.

Pharo, Cuis, Etoys, squeak itself (several variants) and now Edgar's Funsqueak are running around here. Well, mostly they are sleeping. They are certainly not making much noise.

I am currently trying to sort out the plugins needed for certain of the variants.

What I know how do to do:

I have downloaded squeak etoys from squeakland (a while back) and installed it into the shareable area. I can launch etoys with the a copy of the launcher provided. It runs and it can make noise.

I have also downloaded via Add/Remove applications squeak 3.10.2 pretrunk.
The plugings that come with this don't include the correct sound plugin. So out of the box it runs silently. 

The launcher for 3.10.2 cab be jury rigged to use the squeakdev vm but to include the etoys  plugins. Sound worked but there were other problems. Back to the drawing board.

I ended up  copying the 3.10.2 plugins into a folder in my home directory and adding a copy of the sound plugin from etoys. That got sound working in 3.10.2 (pre-trunk) and avoided the other problems.

Of course, trunk now has closures and needs a closure vm.

Having learned the launcher trick. I can load squeak images into my home directory (I don't need to install them in usr space) and run them from vm's which may also be in my home space.

Pharo  comes with a closure vm for linux pre-assembled. I have that in my home space. I run the closure squeaks (both Pharo and trunk) by creating launchers to open clousure images with the Pharo vm. The vm directory has various subdirectories with what look like plugin sourse and binaries in them. If I launch with the command '.../pharovm' '.../mysqueak.image' the squeak image will run. Silently. Sigh.

If I modify the command by adding '-plugins '.../myPluginDir' Then the image will load, flicker and just quit. *Sigh*.

So at this stage of my knowledge I am forced to run *silently*.

That's not really acceptable. What do I need to know about plugins to get sound working on my Ubuntu system?

Details:
Ubuntu 8.04
Pharo vm (and plugins) from pharo-vm-0.15.2d-linux.zip
Current images Squeak trunk #9371
and Fun Squeak #9400

So I am asking for help in the form of a backgrounding in plugins. How to install them. Where to install them. How to know if they are in their right places with all the right extentions mime types etc.

How can I command current squeaks to speak?

Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace