I have read somewhere, maybe watched it on television, that human ears are the first of the five senses that become active just as you wake up. It means you hear sounds around you first, before you feel the pillow, see the morning sunshine or smell the breakfast coffee.

But can you imagine life without sounds? I can’t. Music is part of my everyday life from the morning news to my MP3 while getting some work done up to my nightly habit of watching anime shows. That is why I equip my computer with 5.1 speaker system to make sure that I get the best sound out of anything that my computer plays.

Even our home entertainment system is equipped with branded sound system to make sure that every movie that we watch on the DVD player is as real as it can get. And contemporary computer speakers are easy to find. If you what Google is, then you are halfway there to finding the best set of speakers that you can find. A good sound system cannot replace what a cheap, poor speaker system so it is always good to invest in something that is worth your money.

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When using VMware for virtualization, you might encounter an error related to your sound device:

Failed to open sound device /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy

If you see this error, this means the sound device in your host machine is currently in use and the VMware client is not able to access the device. Here is also a little bit of information from the vmware knowledge base:

Some other program is using the sound device. You must quit that program first. While every virtual machine on a host can be configured with a sound device, only one virtual machine at a time can actively use the device. If another virtual machine is currently using it, simply terminate the application inside it that is producing sound.

Another possible cause is that the Enlightenment Sound Daemon is running and using the sound device. VMware recommends you turn off the Enlightenment Sound Daemon.

Though I have not found a way to fix this yet, there is a workaround that might help if you want to use sounds in your virtual machine. You might want to kill all esd processes:

# killall esd

You might need to restart your VMware service for the changes to take effect. This method will get the sound device available for your guest OS.

I have tested this on my machine running Fedora 7on my host machine and VMware Server 1.04 with Windows XP as guest OS. Works like a charm.

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