In the last week or so I made a move from Kubuntu over to Ubuntu. I did this because I was going to give XGL/Compiz a try. I had read that trying to get XGL/Compiz working on Ubuntu was easier then try to get XGL/Compiz working on KDE/Kubuntu.

So thats the reason I’m now using Ubuntu and overall I’m happier with the Gnome desktop then I thought I would be. What impresses me the most about Ubuntu is it hardly uses any ram at all when I’m sitting at the desktop..

Once I spent all the time getting the Desktop setup I figured I would skip the XGL/Compiz idea and worry about getting more important things to work such as TeamSpeak 2.

First a bit of background here, I use TeamSpeak every day of the week on Windows XP. I have some friends located all over the world and we all log onto TeamSpeak and talk on a regular basis. When there is no one talking in TeamSpeak I normally fire up Winamp and listen to some tunes or watch a video or whatever.

I knew there was a TeamSpeak client for Linux and I downloaded that and installed it under Ubuntu and when its the ONLY thing running its fine. My problem is I need it to be running like it does on Windows so that I can have my tunes going or a movie and still be able to here if someone calls me over TeamSpeak.

For those who have run TeamSpeak your probably already see where I’m going with this. For the life of me I can’t get TeamSpeak to work with any other audio program under Ubuntu at all. If for example I load up XMMS and have some tunes playing and then load up TeamSpeak I get no audio in TeamSpeak. The strange thing is I can load XMMS up and any of the other media players up and have audio coming out of all of them at the same time no problem..

Now before you go sending me messages about looking at forums and the like I have already done that. In fact I spent the better part of a entire night looking at various HACKS to make TeamSpeak work right. I tried several things and none of them worked for me at all.

I’m using my motherboards built in sound which is part of the Nforce 2 chipset. The motherboard model number is a Asus A7N8X-X. If someone has a way to get TeamSpeak to work as it should I would like to know how you did it. Keep in mind I would only like people to message me who have it working using the motherboard/chipset I mentioned above.

I don’t know what is at fault here the OS or TeamSpeak but I’m really surprised this problem exists at all. When you look on the Windows end of things there are only two VOIP programs that come to mind that can support 50 people at a time and they are TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. Both of these programs have huge followings on the Windows side and I’m really surprised the Linux TeamSpeak client doesn’t behave right.

When looking at the forums for a fix to this I was really stunned how much crap there is to go through to try some of these HACKS out that MIGHT fix the problem. This may not seem like a big problem to some people but it is to me. I have used TeamSpeak in Windows for years now and I want to be able to use it in Ubuntu the same way I do in Windows and from the looks of things so far, it looks like thats not going to happen.

I hope one day that the developer of TeamSpeak 2 makes it open source or decides to make it work with ALSA instead of OSS.

This is yet another speed bump in the road to Linux adoption for me…

WolfManz611..