Sound problems

I was recently tearing my hair out attempting to get 32 bit games (and indeed any other type of software) to work on my 64 bit Linux system.  Every time I loaded them up they ran but without any sound whatsoever.  The error I was getting was:

Cannot open shared library libasound_module_conf_pulse.so

Upon searching the internet I found that I was not alone and it appeared to be a problem with the 32 bit sound libraries (well I could tell that without trawling the internet).  However according to the software available in the repos (Debian Sid/unstable) I had all of the necessary 32 bit libraries installed.

However reading through a post on the Zsnes forum, I found that the specific package (or the lack of it as the case may be) that was causing this problem was lib32asound2-plugins.  I had lib32asound2 installed, but lib32asound2-plugins did not appear to be in the Debian Sid/unstable repos.

I installed the package by downloading the deb file directly from here.  It does say to use the repos rather than downloading debs directly, however at this point I was out of luck.  After installing lib32asound2-pluigins all of my programs (OK then ...... games, if I'm being honest) now ran with sound.

Not the most technical of posts, however I hope that it is able to quickly help anybody else experiencing similar problems.

I was recently tearing my hair out attempting to get 32 bit games (and indeed any other type of software) to work on my 64 bit Linux system.  Every time I loaded them up they ran but without any sound whatsoever.  The error I was getting was:

Cannot open shared library libasound_module_conf_pulse.so

Upon searching the internet I found that I was not alone and it appeared to be a problem with the 32 bit sound libraries (well I could tell that without trawling the internet).  However according to the software available in the repos (Debian Sid/unstable) I had all of the necessary 32 bit libraries installed.

However reading through a post on the Zsnes forum, I found that the specific package (or the lack of it as the case may be) that was causing this problem was lib32asound2-plugins.  I had lib32asound2 installed, but lib32asound2-plugins did not appear to be in the Debian Sid/unstable repos.

I installed the package by downloading the deb file directly from here.  It does say to use the repos rather than downloading debs directly, however at this point I was out of luck.  After installing lib32asound2-pluigins all of my programs (OK then ...... games, if I'm being honest) now ran with sound.

Not the most technical of posts, however I hope that it is able to quickly help anybody else experiencing similar problems.

Sound problems