From time to time, I would start up TCE to find that the sound didn't work. It took me a while to figure out what caused it, but eventually I found that if I had a webpage with a Flash animation open in my web browser, it would prevent sound from working in the game. Leaving a YouTube or Google Video window open was often the cause of this no sound bug. This problem may relate to the sound architecture used by my Linux distro (Ubuntu 6.10), so for all I know it may not be possible to fix this by modifying the game, but hopefully it is. My sound card is a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 with an EMU10K processor. The bug occurred with 0.48, 0.49 and 0.49b.

This is not a tce bug, but a more general et bug. It is caused by et trying to open the sound card for recording (I don't know why they does this, but it almost seems intentional (like they were planning to do in game voice chat).)

The solution I use is to add "echo et.x86 0 0 disable > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss" to your startup scripts (and you can just run it as root as well). There are many forum posts about this issue, so you can check them for any additional workarounds.