Disclaimer: I accept no resposnsibility for any horrible things that happen to you, your computer, and those around you as a result of you following this HOWTO. It may cause you, or those around you, to get fired, kill your dog, insult your mother or make your computer explode and various other things that you might have thought impossible. You follow these instruction at your own risk.

I did this with Workstation 6.5 RC1 build 110068 on Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit.

With that out of the way, the instructions

1. shut down all your virtual machines
2. remove OSS emulation from ALSA, by adding the following lines to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-oss

blacklist snd_pcm_oss
blacklist snd_mixer_oss
blacklist snd_seq_oss

3. unload those modules

$ sudo modprobe -r snd_pcm_oss
$ sudo modprobe -r snd_mixer_oss
$ sudo modprobe -r snd_seq_oss

4. we move the real vmware-vmx executable aside, and create a wrapper script

$ cd /usr/lib/vmware/bin
$ sudo mv vmware-vmx vmware-vmx.real
$ sudo touch vmware-vmx

edit this new vmware-vmx file in your favorite text editor, remembering to start is as root, eg 'sudo vim vmware-vmx'

• start: vmware-vmx ----

#!/bin/bash

padsp $0.real "$@"

• end: vmware-vmx ----

5. Now to set the required permissions on the wrapper script.

$ sudo chmod a+x,u+s vmware-vmx

6. Now to set the permissions on the library used to send OSS calls to PulseAudio.

$ sudo chmod u+s /usr/lib/libpulsedsp.so

That's it!

I tested this by playing music out of rhythmbox, and logging into a Windows XP guest. When I heard that dreaded login sound, I knew it was all working.

If you get stuttering sound, do the following:

$ sudo adduser $USER pulse-access
$ sudo adduser $USER pulse-rt

and add the following lines to $HOME/.pulse/daemon.conf

• start: daemon.conf

high-priority = yes
nice-level = -11
realtime-scheduling = yes
realtime-priority = 5
default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 5
resample-method = speex-float-3

• end: daemon.conf

restart the daemon, and stuttering should be better. Try tuning the values in daemon.conf if there is still stuttering.