{"id":5349,"date":"2023-09-13T02:23:18","date_gmt":"2023-09-13T10:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wonghoi.humgar.com\/blog\/?p=5349"},"modified":"2025-12-29T23:46:52","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T07:46:52","slug":"getting-sound-to-work-ubuntu-vm-guests-for-hyper-v","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wonghoi.humgar.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/13\/getting-sound-to-work-ubuntu-vm-guests-for-hyper-v\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting sound to work Ubuntu VM guests for Hyper-V"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s frustrating that there are no simple packages provided by Microsoft or Ubuntu to get something as basic as sound working on Hyper-V. It’s nuts that we still have to deal with these kind of integration bullshit in 2023 when people are claiming that Linux is useable! At the time of writing, there are still way too many rough edges on Linux that are clearly not the users’ fault!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand why things are the way they are. We have to first understand that Hyper-V talks to the VM under RDP under the hood which has many advantages that the RDP provides. RDP is way less sluggish for the video and sound quality than the damned X11 server, which people spent little time to provide for Windows. MobaXterm is the only decent free X11 server for Windows in terms of user experience but it’s not the first one that populate search results. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, we’ll need to set up Linux to stream the apps through RDP, not X11 to take advantage of Hyper-V manager’s interface (specifically vmconnect.exe<\/code> under the hood). In Linux, this area is not maturely developed and the author of xrdp<\/code> is not keen to make polished packages so most of the time we get pointed to the struggle of compiling the source code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given RDP is not native to Linux, xrdp did not rebuild the guts of X11 that maps natively to RDP. Instead it launches a bare minimal RDP session with nothing on it other than a basic client (sesman) that you can use it as a VNC client or X11 client that streams to the bare minimum RDP, so there’s an extra layer of indirection. You are not running RDP natively. That RDP session is for you to call X11. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since X11 does not natively stream audio, you need to a sound server (over network) system that streams the audio to the bare minimal RDP layer of xrdp, then have the RDP layer stream\/relay to RDP with pulseaudio-module-xrdp<\/code> (which is a kernel package that you need to build from scratch at the time of writing since there’s no packages for it).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way, if you get this xrdp+pulseaudio ordeal working, you also get (x)RDP working for the linux even if you don’t use vmconnect to connect to it, because it’s RDP under the hood anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I followed the messy (and often broken) instructions from multiple sources to build and install pulseaudio-module-xrdp, but it turned out this wasn’t enough. There’s no sound and the anticipated sound device didn’t show up in Ubuntu and all I see is a dummy sound driver. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Turns out there are many pieces of the puzzle scattered through different blogs and the blog either has typos, missing a key component, or the URLs changed so it’s broken. Here’s an overview of what you need to do<\/p>\n\n\n\n