TL;DR: If you're having sound and frame-rate issues, use the OpenAL sound module. You'll need to create a symlink libopenal.so.0 to libopenal.so.1, since Warsow is expecting the former. Noob instructions follow.

So like, I have an ATI Radeon RV516 and a Pentium 4 HT, and I was using Ubuntu Lucid, right? And I wanted to play Warsow but I was having all sorts of issues with stuttering sound and a very low frame rate, right? So then I was like, OK I gotta fix this, right? And so I fixed it and I thought I'd tell everyone on my blog, right?</teenagegirl>

Anyway here's how you fix that shit. I'm using the version of Warsow available from the Warsow website. I haven't tried it with the one in the package repositories, because that's always twenty fucking years out of date. Here goes:

Install OpenAL.

sudo apt-get install libopenal1

Change to your Warsow directory and create a symbolic link from /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 to libopenal.so.0 .

cd ~/warsow
ln -s /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 libopenal.so.0

Run Warsow with the current working directory appended to the dynamic linker path. (This is how you will run Warsow from now, by the way.)

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./warsow.i386

Go to Setup -> Sound options and set the sound module to "OpenAL"

You're done! And it works MUCH better under Lucid than it ever did on Jaunty, hooray! :D