Sound on your local machine with rdesktop

Jeffrey P. Bigham

Related Ads

I'm a linux lover, but sometimes (often for no fault of its own) it can be a pain in the butt. For instance, listening to music can be a pain if the source of your music has somehow been targetted at Windows users. Even if it's now, Windows can (out of the box) be a lot simpler to just get to work with multimedia. Whether you buy that or not, here's how you can combine the awesomeness of Linux with the ease of Window's auditory pleasures.

It's actually very simple assuming you have a Windows machine with remote desktopping enabled that you can access. My department just happens to have such a machine - let's call that machine sharktooth for this example. Then you would type:

rdesktop -r sound=local sharktooth

That starts rdesktop (the Linux remote desktopping tool) with default features and turns on sound redirection from the server to your local machine. If everything goes right, then you'll hear whatever sounds are played on the Windows machine on your local machine. You can just start up Windows Media Player (I know, gasp...) and listen away!