local apps how-to

[Warren Togami]

Robert Arkiletian wrote:
>> It is possible that more environment variables are needed to direct a local
>> app to use the pulseaudio daemon.  You might want to check with upstream, I
>> recall they tackled this recently.
> 
> Tried googling for these environment variables but couldn't find them.
> I only tried
> FIREFOX_DSP="padsp"
> in
> ~/.mozilla/firefox/rc
> but that didn't work.

No, it would be LTSP local apps specific environment variables.

> 
>> Also make sure you are using the LATEST builds of ldm, ltspfs and ltsp on
>> both your server and client chroot.  Latest builds were yesterday.
>>
> 
> Can I make sure I have these by doing a yum update inside and outside
> of the chroot?

I don't know if the latest ldm and ltspfs have hit Fedora 9 updates yet. 
  But soon, yes.

> 
>>> Unfortunately,  I still could not get flash to work with sound. In
>>> addition, launching firefox on a 1.4GHz Athlon with 256MB client with
>>> a 100mbps connection takes over 30 seconds.
>>>
>> Over 30 seconds the first time, or even subsequent times on the same user?
>>
> 
> I have something interesting to report:
> With 256MB on client firefox was not any faster launching it the
> second time around but after I upgraded to 512MB the second launch
> went down to 3-4 seconds from an initial 30. So it seems for firefox
> to be kept in cache locally, 256 is not enough.
> 
> BTW is the firefox binary downloaded to the client through ssh or nfs?
> 

nfs, which is pretty slow.  It seems like most of the slowness of 
launching firefox is because it is downloading a large number of large 
executables.  You might be able to improve the perceived launch speed by 
using NBD instead of NFS root (supported in Fedora LTSP5 for a while but 
not documented.)  Also preloading files into client's RAM using 
something like readahead with a custom config file might help.  But I 
have just now learned that readahead was removed from Fedora a release 
ago.  Hmm...

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com