Civilization V Audio Issues on Chromebook

So, I recently purchased an Acer C720 Chromebook for use during my upcoming trip to the big apple as it was cheap and fit the bill for everything I really need a laptop. But, being who I am I had to try and do more with it. The laptop itself is the C720-3404 which comes with an Intel Core i3-4005U processor, 4GB ram, and a 32GB SSD. This is really more than powerful enough for a lot of different application (including some games) and is especially nice since I got it for <$300 USD. The only thing I had to do to get gaming was to use Crouton to install a chrooted install of linux side by side with Chrome OS. Install steam, grab some games, and I am ready to go.

Everything pretty well works out of the box, but you will find some issues do crop up. The main reason for this post is the only real issue I have had with the setup so far. I experienced audio skipping and stuttering in Civilization V by default. After a whole lot of googling and a few attempted fixes later I believe I found the shortest path to smooth audio. In case anyone needs it for their own install, just modify /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and un-comment/update the following entries:

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default-sample-rate = 48000
default-fragments = 5
default-fragment-size-msec = 2

I have also updated the Crouton wiki page with this information so hopefully it won’t take less time for the next person to solve this same issue. Just for reference, I installed Ubuntu Trusty with XFCE4 in my crouton chroot.

Jun 06, 2015