newbie needs help translating linux tech speak
 

First a little background. I'm trying to get sound to work in my VMs. I'm using CentOS 5.5 with kvm. After a great deal of hair pulling I've sort of half figured out that VNC the default viewer doesn't pass sound from the VM to the host. So, I'm trying to set up Spice, which does pass audio from guest to host. I thought it would be as easy as using Add Remove Software and selecting qspice, but apparently that only installs the spice server, not the client.

I found some instructions on the net which explains how to install the spice client on CentOS. Nice! The only problem is the author assumes a much higher level of technical competency than I currently possess. Link here: http://www.geekgoth.de/tag/centos/

Quote: "I downloaded the packages sources an installed them in my buildroot."
Me: "Uh, you did what now?"
I think he's talking about compiling from source, a process I've heard about but never attempted. Are we talking compiling a new kernel here or what?

So can someone please help a confused newbie understand these instructions so I can get a working spice client on my box? Alt solution - if anyone can explain how to get sound out of VNC?

Thanx!

First off, if CentOS is what you have running on your VM, then you should not have to install the Spice client on CentOS . . . the Spice server on the CentOS VM should serve the interface to the Spice client on your Windows host . . . Again, this is assuming that I understand you correctly.

Secondly, building from source is not as intimidating as it seems . . . the "buildroot," for example, is just a folder. (It's any folder you choose, but people usually use folders in /usr/src or /usr/local/src.)

He's just saying that he downloaded the compressed source package and extracted it into a folder on his machine. (Eg, downloaded a file like 'source.tar.gz' and did a 'tar xvzf' on it.)

No, you're not talking about compiling a new kernel.

Ok, cool! I was hoping I didn't have to recompile the kernel 'cause that sounds pretty messy! So, I just compile the app. I think I can google that. I am running CentOS on the host btw..

One more question. He's talking about editing some kind of config file "After commenting out this line, adding the resulting binary to the %files section and rebuilding using rpmbuild -bb --define "dist .el5_4" qspice.spec"

What is this all about? Which file needs to be edited? Is he making an installer here?