Bluestone Blog

Running “padsp vmware” did not produce working sound for me. VMware complained of not being able to detect the sound card.

I found these instructions to make VMware work with PulseAudio under Ubuntu 8.10 as described on this site: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/163605 . However the instructions lead me down a dead end and did not work under Fedora 11.
I experimented a little on my 32bit Fedora 10 and 64 bit Fedora 10 workstations. I discovered I could make audio work under VMware quite easily on Fedora 10. I also discovered that Fedora 10 provides a /dev/dsp device file from its OSS sound adapter. Determined that this was the answer to my 64 bit Fedora 11 workstation audio problem, I researched how to restore the /dev/dsp device file to Fedora 11.

I removed the alsa-plugins-pulseaudio RPM.

• yum remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio

Then I made sure the OSS modules were being loaded

• sudo modprobe snd_mixer_oss
• sudo modprobe snd_pcm_oss
• sudo modprobe snd_seq_oss

I added my user account to the “audio” group . I explicitly specified my XP VMware instance to use the /dev/dsp device file with the sound.file parameter and set sound.autodetect = “FALSE”. I rebooted and crossed my fingers.

After more research I discovered this Fedora 11 bug, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=501051. The author of comment #17 suggests:

“I needed to uncomment a line in /etc/modprobe.d/dist-oss.conf to load those
modules.. Appears they’re caught up in the “disable OSS” feature of F11.”
Uncommenting the referenced line in dist-oss.conf, ensures the aforementioned oss sound modules are loaded when Fedora boots.
To my surprise VMware was able to detect the sound card and allowed XP access to it. Skype 3.8 is now able to make calls. It appears I am back in business. I wanted to share the steps I took to make audio work with VMware and Fedora 11 in the hope they save someone the time and effort I spent to find my solution.

I also wanted to express my concern that the Fedora project is not good at maintaining backward compatibility. I can see the benefit of PulseAudio. It seems to make sound much more reliable under Linux. But the Fedora Project should make a better effort to maintain backwards compatibility with applications behind the curve such as VMware. From an outsider’s perspective it seems like it would be trivial to create /dev/dsp device files on demand and send the audio to the PulseAudio system. (padsp is suppose to do this but apparently doesn’t work with all applications including VMware) If such a capability existed, it would have been easier to resolve my VMware problems.

Enough ranting. Happy hacking.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 2:59 am and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.