openSUSE 12.1: random games crash on start (my fix)

Had an issue where various games were crashing when started, these included: Trine, Penumbra 1 & 2, Hacker Evolution: Untold, and several others.

Errors included an array of things such as “couldn’t load library X”, segmentation faults, etc (sorry, I didn’t record all the errors before fixing my problem!). Most of the searches on these errors pointed to missing 32-bit compatibility libraries, but for me, that was not the case.

Since I had a lot of issues in 11.4 with pulseaudio, and the errors seemed to be hinting at an audio problem, I figured I’d remove it and see what happened. Sure enough, all the games now start without issue. I even see some options in my mixer that were previously missing/hidden by pulseaudio.

----- Error from Hacker Evolution ------
SDLMixerSoundSystem::SDLMixerSoundSystem() + 0x189
Init_Sound() + 0x23
initGameEngine() + 0x4b5
main + 0x188
__libc_start_main + 0xed
----- crash -----

This also resolved an issue with the game Aquaria (Linux version). It wasn’t crashing, but, the sound was jacked, like tracks were getting stuck and replaying over and over.)