Getting Ventrilo To Work In WINE

by Aleksandar Micovic

Let me start off by saying that if you want to support Linux, then use TeamSpeak. But if you’re like me and for some reason you must use Ventrilo, then you’ve come to the right place. Ventrilo can work under Linux using WINE. Quite easily too. That is, if you follow this guide.

Truth be told, I shouldn’t be making this post. The Linux version of Ventrilo is officially “under development” But, between you and me, I don’t think it’ll come out any time soon. So, with that said! Let’s begin. I’m going to assume you have WINE installed on your system, and you’re ready to go. At the time of writing this, the current version is 0.9.57.

  • Download the Ventrilo executable from the Ventrilo website. Install it using WINE.
  • Try running Ventrilo now. With this WINE version, Ventrilo runs and displays the GUI without any problems. I would expect that future releases of WINE won’t break it.
  • Now that you have Ventrilo installed, exit WINE and try to locate your Windows box. There is a file that we need from there. I’ve searched the internet thoroughly, this file is not online! Or at least, I can’t find it. My google-fu ain’t what it used to be. Anyways, the file we are looking for is located at:

    • C:/WINDOWS/system32/msgsm32.acm
  • As far as I know, it shouldn’t matter if you’re trying to get Ventrilo to work on a 32-bit or 64-bit system. I know that there is a “32″ in msgsm32, but trust me, it doesn’t matter. At least for me, anyway. The next step is to edit a WINE file. Open up the file below with your favourite text editor.

    • ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system.ini
  • Next, add this line to the file.

    • MSACM.msgsm610=msgsm32.acm
  • Now WINE should recognize the GSM codec. And that’s it! Ventrilo should work now.

Of course, it’s never that simple. Ventrilo will still get a graphical glitch every now and then. It’s nothing too big, but can be annoying when you’re trying to change channels (they start to look mashed together). It’s also worth noting that while this solution works, currently the push-to-talk feature does not work. This isn’t a Ventrilo problem, but rather a WINE problem. It would seem that WINE does not handle events properly. There is a pretty ugly work around for this located right here. If you’re going to try the fix, do not use characters like ctrl or alt for your push-to-talk hotkeys (they never worked for me). 64-bit systems will also have trouble with the fix.

If you have problems, here are a few links:

A thread about Ventrilo and WINE.
The ugly fix. (Same one as above)
The Wine AppDB page for Ventrilo

If you have any trouble following the fix, just post a comment. I hope this helps someone out! :)