I finally fixed sound in linux ut2004 perfectly!
Posted 12:03:30 AM on Thu, 10th January 2008 by Dj-ZoRt!

what a legacy....

well im using debian which is requires some loving for ut2004 to work properly

firstly one removes the ut2004/System/libopenal.so and links it to /usr/lib/libopeal0.so
then similarly remove and link the libSDL

but you need to force openal to use alsa... (for the longest time i thought it was just my soundcard sucking - in addition to the oss layer sucking)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2325660

one needs to force alsa in the ~/.openalrc file

ie

echo "(define devices '(driver))" > ~/.openalrc

where 'driver' is

# native (OSS)
sdl (Simple DirectMedia Layer backend, see above Q/A)
arts (arts backend)
esd (ESounD backend)
alsa (ALSA)
waveout (Output a wav file)
null (no sound)

which may look like, as in my case...

echo "(define devices '(alsa))" > ~/.openalrc

then edit ~/.ut2004/System/UT2004.ini in the ALAudio.ALAudioSubsytem section make sure the following is set.

UseDefaultDriver=False

and viola! ut2004 runs heaps better. like, not grinding and clunky. smooth sound as one would expect. even on my super-duper onboard realtek sound, it sounds good.

i dont doubt this will have similar results on other distributions and with other sound cards. for newbies, libopenal will have the same behaviour on other systems, so give it a try. also debian or otherwise, the kernels are all the same, so yeah - will also help.