Windows XP KVM guest on Fedora 13 No Sound Solution

I don't know how long I've been trying to get sound working on my Windows guest under KVM. It's been at least one year (at least since Fedora 11). I 'googled' here, I 'googled' there, I found a lot of people having issues, and a lot of half-assed answers that never really solved my problem.

My biggest problem was that I kept trying to get sound working using VNC as the Virtual Display. I decided to switch to SDL instead, and sound worked great.

Here's what I've done:
First I tried to follow these directions:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Virtualization_problems#SDL_Graphics

You may encounter the issue where your $XAUTHORITY is a file under a session based directory like this: /var/run/gdm/auth-for-ansilva-4kdkMG/database

Therefore, you would probably have set the permissions described on that file every time you reboot on your machine.

What I ended up doing was to edit the /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf, and get qemu-kvm to run as my user:

user = "ansilva"
group = "ansilva"

Then, I did the following:

1. Turn off selinux. (edit /etc/selinux/config and reboot) # or set selinux to permissive
2. Restart libvirtd.
3. Under virt-manager, remove your "Display 0".
4. Still under virt-manager, add a new "Display 0" (called 'Graphics' under 'Add Hardware'), choose Type: Local SDL window

Sound just works now, and I can watch Netflix on my laptop.

Getting Windows XP installed on KVM under Fedora 13 + virt-manager

On a separate note, if you try to install Windows XP via virt-manager, and have an issue after the installation that VM can't boot, the way to fix that is by creating your disk image using the qcow2 format. It worked for me.

Oh, and to get better Resolution selection under windows, use the 'VGA' graphics driver, instead of whatever else virt-manager picks for you automatically.