VMPlayer and ALSA

[Roner]

I have had a nagging problem with VMPlayer: it uses OSS for sound. That means that unless OSS is enabled and loaded, I get the annoying /dev/dsp not found message when the player starts; as I was moving to Dapper, many updates broke OSS and made the problem reappear. Additionally, this means that while another application is using OSS and the player tries to access it, it will hang with an error message.

To enable OSS to begin with, follow the first section of this thread:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...light=oss2jack

The best solution for me was adapted from this thread on the vmware forums; it uses the alsa-oss package and enables VMPlayer to use ALSA for sound.

1. Install VMPlayer and create your image. I was greatly helped by this guide; browse the rest of the thread for instructions on using qemu without wine.

After you have a working image and preliminary installation of the guest OS:

2. Get the alsa-oss package:

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

3. Ensure that the /usr/lib/libaoss.so.0.0.0 library is setuid:

sudo chmod +s /usr/lib/libaoss.so.*

4. Rename the VMPlayer bin file:

sudo mv /usr/bin/vmplayer /usr/bin/vmplayerorig

5. Create a new VMPlayer bin file:

sudo vi /usr/bin/vmplayer

Copy and paste the following into the file:

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=libaoss.so exec /usr/bin/vmplayerorig "$@"

Make the new file executable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/vmplayer

That's it. In the Multimedia Systems Selector choose either ALSA or Autodetect, and you will have sound in VMPlayer, and no hangs.