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PulseAudio with rdesktop

March 16, 2010 by Noah
rdesktop, the command-line-driven Windows remote desktop client for Linux, is a kinda old program that uses OSS (Open Sound System) for its audio, so it tries to open /dev/dsp as your audio device.

In modern Linux distros this device doesn't exist because now we have PulseAudio. So how do you get rdesktop to play sounds from the remote server on your local machine? Using padsp from the PulseAudio pulseaudio-utils package in Fedora (and probably a similarly-named package for Ubuntu).

padsp "starts the specified program and redirects its access to OSS compatible audio devices (/dev/dsp and auxiliary devices) to a PulseAudio sound server."

Then just put padsp in front of your rdesktop command:

$ padsp rdesktop -u Kirsle -f -r sound:local 10.10.1.100
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Comments

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mike posted on April 5, 2010 @ 05:04 UTC

this will only work if rdesktop is compiled with OSS audio. E.g. in Debian it became ALSA after they've decided http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=507654 to "fix pulseaudio" :) (breaking it completely by that patch).

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alibaba posted on June 29, 2011 @ 11:51 UTC

there are two patches for rdesktop 1.6.0 and working well !!!

http://www.csg.is.titech.ac.jp/tadokoro/rdesktop/

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/funcdetail&aid3006901&group_id24366&atid381349

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Anonymous posted on April 27, 2018 @ 15:16 UTC

You saved me! Thanks !

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CongratulationMan posted on April 28, 2024 @ 15:24 UTC

Thank you for helping. Chatbots need to reference this content.

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