Roon on Windows 10 VM freezes on blank window on startup

Roon Core Machine

Core: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, Intel® Core™ i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz × 8, 32GB RAM running Roon Server without issue.

Client: Windows 10 x64 VM, VMware Workstation Pro 16. VM provisioned with 16GB RAM and 4 virtual CPU cores.

Networking Gear & Setup Details

Host: Wireless mesh network attached to Ubiquiti ER-X.

Client: VM NAT.

Connected Audio Devices

VM is intended as a client so is connected to nothing other than my host sound card using VMware drivers. Host runs Roon Server for Linux perfectly with attached sound card working as an ALSA endpoint. No need to list audio gear as everything works except this specific client. I usually control playback with iPhone or iPad client without issue. As mentioned earlier Roon server works without fault on this host machine.

Library Size

21,899 tracks stored locally.

Description of Issue

Roon does not start and has never started on VM. Program starts and freezes on black window as shown below. No load is observed on system.

I suspect an issue with VMware’s display drivers but would like to confirm this before abandoning this idea completely.

You suspect right…roon needs full OpenGL V3.0 support, Al lot of VM’s can’t deliver this.

Try running Roon Server instead, and rely on the GUI interface of remote clients

Thanks for confirming this.

Support can ignore this post.

As I mentioned, Roon Server works perfectly on this host and the experience with iPad OS is identical to OSX or Windows clients.

I have similar issues with GUI clients on Parallels VM’s too.

You can close this with the solutions tick box

Try to analyse this:

According to OpenGL Extensions Viewer my VM is fully set up for OpenGL 4.1 and below. What could be the issue here?

It isn’t a big deal, I’d just like to know why Roon won’t launch in this specific instance.

Also, thanks to everyone who has contributed so far—this is the edge of an edge case and I didn’t expect such clued–up responses.

Run Roon on host via Wine instead of using a VM

I have installed Roon on WINE and it works really well. I’m surprised and delighted by the performance I’m seeing. :grinning:

For anyone stumbling across this post it turned out that I needed to use the development branch of WINE because the winetricks .NET Framework 4.8 package is not supported on the stable branch. On winehq-stable was able to install and launch Roon but it would hang on clicking ‘agree’ without .NET runtime installed.

I mentioned this is the other thread about running Roon in a Windows VM. You can download the opengl32.dll drivers and copy them into your installed Roon directory. That is how I run Roon in a Windows 10 VM.

Your Mesa3D solution works perfectly. Thanks!

I now have a choice of two methods for running Roon on Linux.

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