Derek Bodner’s Blog

At home I have an old computer setup with a pair of 500 GB drives running a samba server that I use to store documents, photos, music, etc on so that I can easily access all my stuff from my desktop and laptop, so my girlfriend can access them, anyone else that comes over can access them, etc. I also have vmware server setup with a Windows XP VM running on the server, partly so I have a windows testing environment with IE, and partly so I can rdp into it when I’m out somewhere else so I can access all my documents (I’d rather not setup VNC or X to allow remote connections to my desktop). Well, in the past I’ve connected with rdesktop from my Gentoo workstation at work and tried playing my music collection from work, only to get a DirectSound error in winamp. Tried the same from my Gentoo desktop at work, and got the same result. I never really worried about it too much, because it was never a top priority. I just figured I screwed something up in the VM.

So today I was at a relatives house who runs Windows XP. I remoted into the VPS, and lo and behold, the music played fine. Hrm. Weird. I know sound works on my desktop.

So I try connecting from my Gentoo desktop again, and sound plays fine. Odd. After testing with my Laptop (which dual boots windows) and my desktop, what I’ve found is:
If I startup vmware, and connect to it from Linux first, I get the DirectSound error.
If I startup vmware, connect to it from a windows computer, disconnect, then connect to it from a linux computer, sound works.

I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for this, but it’s escaping me at this time. Eh, whatever. I’ll just be happy sounds working and be happy listening to my full mp3 collection from work.