PulseAudio with rdesktop

rdesktop, the command-line-driven Windows remote desktop client for Linux, is a kinda old program that uses OSS (Open Sound System) for its audio, so it tries to open /dev/dsp as your audio device.

In modern Linux distros this device doesn't exist because now we have PulseAudio. So how do you get rdesktop to play sounds from the remote server on your local machine? Using padsp from the PulseAudio pulseaudio-utils package in Fedora (and probably a similarly-named package for Ubuntu).

padsp "starts the specified program and redirects its access to OSS compatible audio devices (/dev/dsp and auxiliary devices) to a PulseAudio sound server."

Then just put padsp in front of your rdesktop command:

$ padsp rdesktop -u Kirsle -f -r sound:local 10.10.1.100