Comment 1 for bug 211698

A TEMPORARY WORKAROUND FOR GETTING 32-BIT SDL TO USE ESD:

Before using that, I should probably give two warnings:
1. THE ALTERNATIVE SDL LIBRARY GETS EXTRACTED MANUALLY TO /usr/lib32. You won't find it using dpkg or Synaptic.
2. On an update to ia32-libs (like a one made today), it'll probably get overwritten by ia32-libs' SDL library with the ALSA backend. I've realized that after a 32-bit SDL app has got almost no sound, and as expected, crashed on quit. (That is if ALSA uses the "pulse" device and tries to wrap everything to PulseAudio)

Anyway, the proposed solution is getlibs:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790

The command to install the 32-bit SDL library with an ESD backend (requires root permissions):
getlibs -p libsdl1.2debian-esd