The addition to line 12 of /usr/bin/etoys should be:
 -vm-sound-oss
(all hyphens - the punctuation was garbled in one of the earlier messages.)

Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> Only if someone can think of a way to reliably detect the problem.
...
>  (PulseAudio) is what appears to break Squeak sound, because it works
> fine on "real ALSA" but breaks on "emulated ALSA".

Oh, I had hoped the workaround would be an effective fallback for
everyone on Debian derivatives.  I bet the lack of native ALSA is far
from trivial to detect in a shell script :(

> OSS is obsolete. It's not supported out-of-the-box on most modern Linux
> distros anymore. If at all, it is provided by an emulation layer like
> alsa-oss which adds considerable delay. We would get Squeak talking to OSS
> talking to emulated ALSA talking to PulseAudio talking to real ALSA. No
> wonder there is delay in that.

I haven't done any testing - is the delay noticeable?  The OSS API
(via emulation layers) is not obsolete, and OSS is still the standard
on BSD.

10 years ago, ALSA was the next big thing.  Now, ALSA is fading away,
and OSS and /dev/dsp , with all their flaws, are still here.

> Here is an overview of the various Linux sound APIs:
>
> http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/guide-to-sound-apis.html

(great guide - thanks -  and the author admits his bias too!  I also
enjoyed the linked article:  http://lwn.net/Articles/299211/  and
comments)

Given that so many distros have already gone to PulseAudio, Lennart
makes a pretty convincing case for the Linux VM to move towards a
"PulseAudio-safe" subset of the ALSA API.  Thanks for your patience
with me.

David