pulse-audio and vmware-player - get sound going on Fedora

vmware is a PITA concerning sound. However, it is possible to get it to run with pulse-audio. This is how it works:

• Get the  current vmplayer from vmware.com. It is free and it comes in a 32 and a 64 bit version now. I used vmplayer 2.5 (64 bit version) on Fedora 8.
• Get the VMWare DSP preload library called vmwaredsp-1.3. You might have some trouble finding it on the web because many Google links point to an outdated location. Its current home seems to be http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/.
• Compile it. If you use the 64 Bit version, you might need some tweaking for the compiler names and it has trouble finding the arts sources. Match the Makefile in the 64 directory to the one in the 32 directory and you should be fine.
• There should be three libraries in either /usr/lib (32 bit) or /usr/lib64 (64 bit).
• Go to the vmplayer install directory. In my case, this is /usr/lib/vmware/bin/
• open the launcher.sh in an editor and look for the line “$binary” “$@”.
  Replace it with
  if [ `basename $binary` = “vmplayer” ]; then
    LD_PRELOAD=libvmdsp.so VMDSP_BACKEND=esd “$binary” “$@”
    else
    “$binary” “$@”
    fi
• You are done.

To verify operation, open the pulse-audio volume control and select the playback tab. Whenever a sound is played in your virtual machine, there should a playback stream pop up.

22 October 2008 | Uncategorized | Comments