I get no sound when running a guest under virt-manager using KVM, virtlib, and QEMU.

Sound works with guests using AQEMU.

Any ideas where to look.

If I pick the es1370 the drivers get loaded and everything appears to work but no sound. I have check to make sure the volume is set.

If I start the guest with AQEMU using the same qcow2 file as is being used in virt-manager sound works.

This means that there is something configured wrong in virt-manager at least that would seem to hold true.

I have dug around and it seems this is a fairly common problem.

I am going to mark this one as solved, with a few caveats.

Basically the sound is off by design on the assumption that you would not want several different VM's running at the same time making sound.

So OK that makes sense but it is possible to get sound to work with virt-manager.

The easiest way is to use AC97 sound as the sound device in virt-manager and if your client supports AC97 it should work.

There are other ways to get it to work depending on what your doing.

I did not try the other methods so I am not going to go over them.

Suffice to say this shows up as a bug report every so often on the assorted virt-manager bug reporting sites here is an example.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...rt/+bug/591489

So I consider this a limitation of virt-manager which may or may not concern the individual user. For me it again depends virt-manager has some nice features but for certain applications it will not work. I have experienced this with both VIrtualBox and AQEMU. So far the most flexible seems to be KVM/libvirt/QEMU and the command line or scripts. That is still a bit of a pain. Hopefully the AQEMU maintainer will update at some time but it seems to be a dead project. It is open source and written in QT4 so maybe it will get picked up by someone. I noticed that someone at RedHat has fixed a bug as recently as this year.

On a side note I was having problems with the icons in virt-manager but an install of kde-gtk-config and selecting GNOME as the Icon Theme fixed that.

Glad you got it working!
Interesting that switching from '-soundhw es1370' to '-soundhw ac97' is still a solution. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5/#post4633614

Is es1370 supposed to be the default? I've never messed with the sound devices on the desktop virtual machines I've installed (Slackware 14.1 and Windows 7 included), always leaving the default, and sound works for me. I just checked my latest install and it's using ich6. I'm on Slackware64 14.1 host. Glad it's working for you now though.

ich6 is the default.

Not sure why it did not work.

Both of my test VM's are really old Slackware versions 7.0 and 9.1.

No particular reason but that is the real test if the manager can run old and weird stuff.

I have found that newer releases of software tend to work better as they have better hardware support.

I guess I'll try Skackware current or whatever is current for some other distro and see if that is less fussy.

Debian Unstable or the newest Fedora Core should be a good test for hardware support. You might even want to try FreeBSD and if that has trouble, NetBSD.

I can confirm that sound works with spice on Slackware-current. I just tested it.

You know I think FreeBSD current sounds interesting I have not messed with that for a while.

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I installed FreeBSD 10.3 and am installing xorg and cinnamon desktop whatever that is

I should have probably grabbed 11 current

I used FreeBSD for a while but went back to slack.

I installed Slackware 14.1 and sound worked right away. I guess the old stuff is more than a little twitchy

I am still waiting on cinnamon to install on FreeBSD if I knew it would take this long I would have picked something smaller