[liquidwar-user] KDE, ALSA, and sound

[lw . 10 . judebert]

I can't seem to get *any* sound with Liquid War 5.6.2 on my Debian 2.6.6 
(sid/unstable) system with nForce chipset and Allegro version 4.0.3 
Unix.  I'm running under KDE 3.3.0, with aRts configured to output via 
ALSA to my "nforce" device instead of the default device (although they 
are identical).  XMMS plays correctly with the OSS or ALSA outputs; 
Kaboodle plays properly; Xine works with the aRts output. 

When LW starts, it says:

Installing sound (digi="aRts", midi="DIGMID") - success!

Since this is Debian, I also get:

liquidwar: built with a non-Debian (or old) Allegro, running glue code
liquidwar: everything went fine

It even claims to have loaded the sound fx.  No sound. 

I tried changing ~/.allegrorc, specifying ALSA drivers; LW ignored it.  
(This was before I installed liballegro-plugin-arts; until then, it had 
claimed digi="Open Source Sound".)  I also specified XWIN and XDGA 
drivers, which LW also cheerfully ignored.  The Allegro testing stuff 
seems to understand.  At least, the allegro-demo worked, sound and all.

So what am I missing?  Liquid War is the one game I can play with *all* 
my kids, even across Windows/Linux computers.  We love it.  We'd love it 
even more if we could hear it on the Linux computer.

Thanks in advance,
Jude