I solved a really irritating problem yesterday, and since one of the irritating things about it was that the top google hit for several of the ways to google it was a question by me to this list about a previous incarnation, I figured I'd post the solution here. I run a Debian unstable system with alsa, and from time to time, pysol has stopped making sounds. The error message I would get is: pysolsoundserver.error: unable to open audio: No available audio device I finally solved the problem for this incarnation by installing libsdl1.2debian-all, instead of libsdl1.2debian-oss. I suspect the underlying cause of this problem, and possibly lots of other sound problems, is that the dependancy tree isn't sophisticated enough to take into account what sound system is running, and the packaging of the sound libraries isn't sophisticated enough to package everything necessary. It's one of the few cases where being able to read code was actually crucial to solving the problem. Not that I even thought about changing the code, but grepping it to find where the error message was coming from was what gave me the idea to google the message with SDL instead of pysol, and that led me to a post on a game site that suggested installing libsdl1.2debian-all. -- Laura (mailto:lconrad@xxxxxxxxxxxx , http://www.laymusic.org/ ) (617) 661-8097 fax: (501) 641-5011 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139
