RDesktop & Sound

Bluefrog

Hey all,

So I've been thinking about replacing my gigantic Dell Inspiron 9400 with my Acer Aspire One (Linpus - based on Fedora 8 I believe) when on the road using rdesktop to get back into the Inspiron when I need it. Enabled Terminal Services in Vista and can connect without issue from my Acer using the following command:

    rdesktop -u vistausername -p vistapassword -f vistaip

Running rdesktop 1.6. Only thing is, I can't seem to get sound from the Vista machine. I tried:

    rdesktop -u vistausername -p vistapassword -f -r sound:local vistaip

but not a peep comes out. Now I know that the Vista machine is sending sound as the sound output device in Vista is being successfully sent to the RDP output.

I read that rdesktop uses OSS and therefore you need to 'fool' it into using ALSA using the ALSA-OSS package so I installed that and tried:

    aoss rdesktop -u vistausername -p vistapassword -f -r sound:local vistaip

Still no sound. Also tried explicitly setting the driver and installed alsa-plugins-oss:

    aoss rdesktop -u vistausername -p vistapassword -f -r sound:local:oss vistaip

still with no sound.

Now the only thing I haven't done is explicitly set the device in the rdesktop command (it seems it uses /dev/dsp as default) so I'm thinking that maybe this is the issue. Problem is, I don't know how to refer to the output sound device on the Acer.

Anyone have any idea how I should refer to it or anything else I can try?

Bluefrog

For posterity I finally got a solution to this thanks to Tony S from the Irish Linux Users mailing list. Adding -r disk:Z/mnt to the command gives sound.

The command I'm using looks like:

rdesktop -f -r sound:local -r disk:Z/mnt -u vistausername -p vistapassword vistaip