Alien Arena is seriously awesome in the latest incarnation. Unfortunately sound was disabled after the upgrade.

Running from terminal provides the following information:
------- sound initialization -------
dlopen() on libopenal.so.1 failed
Sound failed: Unable to start OpenAL.
Game will continue without sound.

That error message is actually quite good - the first line is the technical problem, the second is what it means, and the last is the result of the problem. Errors involving a "lib" usually mean the lib is not installed (or broken).

OpenAL is a sophisticated free software audio API. Using this system is A Good Thing. A quick check in synaptic shows that the libraries are not installed.

Installing libopenal1 and libopenal-dev packages provides sound. Now everything is peachy.

solved with no replies again.

Hmmm OK ... I ask myself: "why would smoker reply with "???

It does not add anything to the thread, after all.
Is it an admonition? A neutral observation? A congratulation? Hard to tell for sure.
Perhaps he thinks I should have posted the question, then replied to it with the answer? That would make sense if I had not already had the answer when I logged in. Perhaps he thinks I should have used a different title - like "[solution]" instead of "[solved]".

The main problem when people fail to reply to their own questions is that they often edit important (often embarrassing) information out of the original post. Maybe just leaving "Solved it" in its place.

Nah - that can't be it.

I know: I'll take it as congrats Thank you.

Perhaps you'd like to take a look at another thread while you are here? It could use experienced people to comment.

Hey thanks, had the same problem. Seems like the dev package isn't needed though.