Sound under VMWare [was: Mouse fix]

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Fri, 2009-05-15 at 07:56 +0100, Jon Escombe wrote:
> On 15/05/09 04:23, Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 21:35 -0400, Christopher Beland wrote:
> >> According to the FAQ, VMWare should be using ALSA, and if not, that's a
> >> bug which should be reported to the VMWare maintainers.
> >
> > According to this article:
> >
> > http://mike.magin.org/2009/01/08/using-alsa-for-sound-with-vmware-workstation-65-on-an-ubuntu-804-host/
> >
> > VMware Workstation 6.5 still uses OSS by default, but you can force it
> > (in theory at least) to use ALSA. But this has not worked for me as yet.
> > I still can do some poking around in it.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Chris
> 
> So in theory adding the  following line to /etc/vmware/config should use 
> the pulseaudio wrapper instead, but unfortunately it didn't work either 
> (I don't see the wrapper library even being loaded)...
> 
> preload "/usr/lib/libpulsedsp.so"

I found another potential clue here:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1094576#1094576

This says that you should be able to use Pulse Audio directly if you
manually change the settings for your VM from Auto Detect to /dev/dsp.
It also points to several other instructions for wrapping the launch of
VMware in a script with the LD_PRELOAD variable. I tried the above
without creating a wrapper first.

Unfortunately, this didn't work for me either - Workstation complains
that /dev/dsp doesn't exist. However, if I knew what the device entry
for Pulse Audio was - perhaps Workstation could be convinced to use
it...

Cheers,

Chris

--
=============================
"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?'
I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

-- George Bernard Shaw