Dear Jordan Mantha,


This is sort of a heads up.

Jerome Peace, bug tracker here.

I recently started using squeak on a Ubuntu system. I am old to squeak but new to Ubuntu and Linux.

So everything about setting up is new.

Presently loading what Ubuntu offers as a download causes squeak to operate without sound. The vm-sound-ASLA and vm-sound-OSS plugins do not come with the offered package. This has been a problem for over a year.

I am pushing to find someone to act on a solution that solves the problem, not just for myself but for all other naive Ubuntu users who just want to use squeak.

Proof that the solution is in place will be to download and install the Ubuntu offered squeak and have it work with sound.

I have written the squeak-dev list and you can find the posts in the April 2009 archives by searching for Ubuntu.
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2009-April/date.html

You were mentioned by Matej Kosik as the maintainer of the Ubuntu distribution. So I am writing you to let you know what is going on.

Any help you can offer will be appreciated. Copying your replies to the list will be helpful.

The actions I would like to see taken are these.
1) The priority of the bug on launchpad should be changed from
undecided to major or blocking. Computers can interface with users only through the sense of sight or sound. To be missing one of them blocks half of their abilities.
2) Sound can be restored to future downloads by simply coping the 
vm-sound-ALSA plugin from the Etoys distribution into the squeak distribution ( the copied file to be named vm-sound-ALSA.so to go along with the naming scheme.) Nothing more than that is needed to solve this bug.*
3) An update should be made available to 8.04 LTS and others that 
checks for the squeak package, checks the squeak vmplugin library 
iff vm-sound-ALSA.so is missing it recreates and installs that file.
4) These actions taken with the priority implied in step 1.

This fix would probably fix problem that MIT's Scratch is having as well.

Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace

*You may have a wish to recreate the plugin from source. I imagine the source for the Etoys plugin would do for a start. Or others more knowledgable than I could point to it. The existing binaries have worked fine in my tests.

My main point is that this is a serious enough bug that it deserves to be squashed NOW without further delay.