Sound in Mandriva in VirtualBox

So far I've been pleased with the results I'm getting for VirtualBox and Mandriva, but sound is the one thing that isn't working out. When I enable sound with the Null Audio Driver option, Mandriva seems to be OK with it, but the Null Audio Driver doesn't output any sound (unless I'm misunderstanding something about it). So I try the Windows DirectSound driver (XP SP3 host). However, with neither the ICH AC97 nor the Sound Blaster 16 do I get any sound. Mandriva gives me the following error with Sound Blaster 16, and a similar one with ICH AC97:

And sound configuration in the Mandriva Linux Control Center 2008.1 tells me.

So am I doing something wrong in the Virtual Box config, or do I need a Sound Blaster/ICH AC97 driver for Mandriva to get sound working properly? Sound in Mandriva isn't a necessity - without sound it's still a big step over a SSH terminal - but it would be nice to be able to play some of my music (i.e. non-DRM) natively in it rather than having to RightControl+F to Windows to change what music is playing.

 

The Null audio driver is exactly what it means. There is no sound driver (it's piped to /dev/null basically). You have to enable the DirectSound driver at least to get any sound out of it. I'm not sure why you get the playback refused, but the problem lies in Mandriva talking to the sound driver properly. You may need to install the VirtualBox guest additions.

Another thing you might consider is if you just need a few Linux apps in a primarily Windows system, you could use a combination of PuTTY and Xming to run X applications over an SSH connection, and they'll behave close to native apps. I've used that in the past when I'm forced to use Windows.

 

I've got the virtual box additions installed - not sure why it doesn't work. Not a big problem though - I can switch to Windows for music/volume control. Just thought that if there was an easy config switch I was missing it would be nice to see - is good to know that Null Audio is doing just what it was supposed to though. Why they would include it if it does nothing beats me though.

I actually like Mandriva's editing tools better than the ones on the school Red Hat or Solaris 9 computers I'd be connecting to (or at least what's on there now - it's a university computer), so I'll probably stick with Mandriva over linking to those even if I can't get sound working like it should. But I did download it and try it out - seems like it wants to use SSH instead of SSH2? When I select SSH selection it only lists SSH.exe as an acceptable file but my remote connection (non-GUI) client has SSH2 with ssh2.exe instead.