Impromptu Upgrade to 16.10

So like years past, I'm not on a faster track Ubuntu version even though everything was working fine on the LTS version 16.04

Fine, except for the one thing I rarely use, and I now kick myself for obsessing over. In Guild Wars 2 I wasnt hearing the sound. Started digging, since I originally loaded it up using Wine directly, then switched over to Playonlinux as that was much easier to handle and load the game. Up until a recent update the sound was fine. I didnt do anything to the native Ubuntu pulsaudio as I really dont care what the mechanism is as long as it works.

Well, now it wasnt working and I began digging, and finding several "you should have known this" kinds of posts in the Playonlinux forums that said they dont support pulsaduio and the tone seemed to be that if you did use it you were a dredge not worth their time. Go setup Alsasound and be done!

Fine if it hadnt been working just a few short hours ago.  So I kept digging. Tried to halt pulsadio, uninstall pulsaudio. Neither worked. Then I tried to uninstall wine just in case the wine 1.9 was conflicting with the ver 4.? of Playonlinux. Nope, no sound.

So, now its maybe something just needs to be cleared out, the game had been through upgrades as far back as Ubuntu 12.  So I clean out all remnants of wine, uninstall playonlinux, go dig out the latest GWinstaller app and start over fresh.

Big time fail now as the installer wont work and I get a log similar to the following.

fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0xffffffff (nil)
fixme:advapi:RegisterTraceGuidsW (0x495320, 0x24ef248, {3dada31d-19ef-4dc1-b345-037927193422}, 1, 0x24a4f04, (null), (null), 0x24ef260): stub
fixme:gdi:GdiInitializeLanguagePack stub
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)
fixme:ntdll:NtIsProcessInJob stub: 0x26c (nil)

But all the references there talk about mixed 64bit and 32bit wine issues. Clear everythgin again and try pure 64bit, and then pure 32bit....

Fail again.

Finally upgraded to 16.10 thinking maybe there was a change in there that might help/

Fail again.

Decided to really clean out everything (since my home directory is on its own partition) and full erase the root and install fresh fresh everything from OS up to the wine and Playonlinux version and all its subordinate needs.

Still fail, and am seriously thinking its time to update system and get Win10 for games instead.

Then I stumble upon one line in an old forum post that said essentially
"I must go into Configure Wine --> Graphics and then check Emulate a Virtual Desktop. And it runs just as if it was on Windows for me!"

What do you know? that worked! I'm now in prcess of the long network layer download of the GW game finally.  yay!

So like I had back on 13.10 I am now at the point of success.
"At present I am able to run Guild Wars 2, Secondlife, Gpodder, Chrome, Wally, and Blender without any additional tweaking. The last round through this update maze had me losing sound and video from the GW2 install until I went and pulled a beta release of Wine. Almost fearful I was going to have to dig out the compiler and do some make make-install steps, but I didnt have to the beta repo set itself up nicely. But, this time I didn't have to go there. It just ran. Sound was active without glitchy stuttering and everything.

Sound, in Secondlife is always a challenge. This time I thought it was that way again. Since its my main reason for running the application if the sound doesnt work then there isn't much else. But, that worked well too. Seems like something wrong when it all just "works".

 Except this time around I didnt bother with Secondlife, Gpodder, or Wally (yet). Guild Wars 2 and Chrome are fine so far.