The version of Wine provided by default in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx has a curious issue. No sound output. Now I’m not exactly sure why this is but this is an issue I’ve found before using Karmic. To resolve this issue I simply added the PPA for winepulse (https://launchpad.net/~neil-aldur/+archive/ppa) which has a patched version of Wine that uses Pulseaudio. You may know that a few versions ago Ubuntu switched from ALSA to Pulseaudio so it could be this change that causes the problems. Anyway add the PPA and simply do an upgrade and Wine will be replaced with Winepulse.

Advantage? Sound works and, as it’s using Pulseaudio, audio mixing works.

Spotify doesn’t yet have a native Linux client, but that doesn’t stop us from using this brilliant program. The developers of Spotify have made sure that the application has close to 100% compatibility with Wine so it can be used on Linux. The best guide to getting this installed is to follow the guide at the official Spotify website. One thing to mention is that if you are using the latest Wine with Karmic, then you will want to use Pulseaudio instead of ALSA in winecfg.

One thing you will want to do is add Spotify to the Gnome menu. By going to System > Preferences > Main Menu and selecting New Item you can make the shortcut to load Spotify. I selected Sound & Video from the left and clicked New Item using these settings:

Type: Application
Name: Spotify
Command: wine "C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe"
Comment: Spotify

You’ll most likely want to have a nice icon for Spotify. You can download this SVG icon http://kallepersson.se/upl/spotify.svg and place it into /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/ (you’ll need to be superuser to do this):

sudo mv /path/to/spotify.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/

changing /path/to to the location of the spotify.svg file you downloaded. ~/Downloads/spotify.svg if you downloaded using Firefox.

Update: Just noticed that these instructions do not work with Lucid Lynx. I’ll be preparing and publishing an updated guide in the next few days.