Enabling sound in vmware [SOLVED]

gr0x0rd · Guru Joined: 12 Aug 2006 Posts: 311

Hello,

A friend of mine recommended Gentoo to me, so here I am. Eventually, I hope to be running Gentoo with Windows in a vmware console, but in the meantime it's the opposite. I'm using vmware to learn to install, configure and understand Gentoo (and linux in general). Installation was a bit of a challenge, but thanks to all of the excellent docs here I am up and running.

After some initial tweaking I have emerged X and now gnome. My first project will be bridging the gap for all of my multimedia apps and such. But low and behold, I don't have sound.

The first place I went was the ALSA guide. I used lspci to determine the sound device vmware is using, simple enough:

#lspci -v | grep -i audio
Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Ensoniq Creative Sound Blaster AudioPCI64V, AudioPCI128

So I was off to enable the correct driver in my PCI Devices listing and recompile my kernel. Here were my changes:

Sound --->
<*> Sound card support
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture --->
<*> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
[*] Support old ALSA API
[*] Verbose procfs contents
PCI devices --->
<*> (Creative) Ensoniq AudioPCI 1371/1373

Once that was done, I recompiled the kernel, copied it over using

cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel-2.6.22-gentoo-r9

then rebooted the system and emerged the alsa-utils as advised by the guide. But after running alsaconf, I get the following:

No supported PnP or PCI card found.
Would you like to probe legacy ISA sound cards / chips?

After trying that, I get

No legacy drivers are available.

and the utility exits. Can anyone give me some additional things I can try in order to diagnose what's wrong with my sound subsystem?

Thanks in advance,
_________________
~g
emerge -FML...

gentoo_dude · Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 2:12 am Post subject:

gr0x0rd · Guru Joined: 12 Aug 2006 Posts: 311

Excellent! After recompiling with modules, alsaconf found my sound card... thanks dude!

But I'm not quite out of the woods yet... I went through the remaining steps in the ALSA guide and checked my mixer levels etc, and everything looks fine. Gnome still reports that I have no sound- when I try to open volume control, it tells me

No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found.

I did an emerge --search for gstreamer and re-emerged the media-libs one. Even after an env-update and a reboot, I'm still not quite there... any more helpful hints?

Thanks!!!
_________________
~g
emerge -FML...

gentoo_dude · Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 11:52 am Post subject:

Make sure you are part of the audio group to have access to audio on your computer.

gr0x0rd · Guru Joined: 12 Aug 2006 Posts: 311

Hey dude,

Thanks again... my account is a member of the audio group. Sound works from some applications, such as firefox (ex. youtube videos) but not from anything purely gnomish (can't play/hear system sounds after emerging gnome-audio).

I am a n00b at this and I'm still trying to figure out why certain things I have emerged don't seem to be showing up in gnome (such as vlc media player and gftp) but I guess that is a post for the desktop area of the forum.

I noticed a few errors on my last boot, I think there may be an issue with oss support in my kernel- going to re-examine my kernel settings and recompile. I'll post again here once I'm error free.
_________________
~g
emerge -FML...

gentoo_dude · Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 8:13 pm Post subject:

Under Sound -> ALSA -> make sure you enable OSS compatibility. You should set those entries to <*>

gr0x0rd · Guru Joined: 12 Aug 2006 Posts: 311

Thanks dude.

I disabled all the OSS stuff, it got rid of the error messages during bootup, and sound still worked. No changes in gnome however.

I wasnt able to find a setting for OSS compatibility specifically - so I did the following:

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture --->
<M> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
<M> Sequencer support
< > Sequencer dummy client
< > OSS Mixer API
<M> OSS PCM (digital audio) API
[*] OSS PCM (digital audio) API - Include plugin system
[*] OSS Sequencer API
< > RTC Timer support
[ ] Dynamic device file minor numbers
[*] Support old ALSA API
[*] Verbose procfs contents
[ ] Verbose printk
[ ] Debug

The < > OSS Mixer API could only be installed as a module so I left it out, as that clearly wasnt part of your instruction.

Now that I've done this, I get kernel error messages once again, and no change in gnome. Should I get rid of these changes? The kernet errors dont really affect my system; sound still works. Or is the setting you mentioned buried somewhere else in the kernel config?

Thanks again...
_________________
~g
emerge -FML...

gentoo_dude · Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 11:35 pm Post subject:

This is my configuration

gr0x0rd · Guru Joined: 12 Aug 2006 Posts: 311

Thanks dude- I have mirrored your configuration. Sound is all good, but my next mission is getting gnome to support my sound card as well, so I'm off to the Desktop forum.

This thread be solved! My only question is... dude, why you gotta use so many cuss words?

_________________
~g
emerge -FML...

gentoo_dude · Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2007 1:10 am Post subject:

One of my favorite movies!