[K12OSN] struggling with sound

[Quentin Hartman]

Colleagues-
    I have a couple new LTSP installations and I am having a heck of a
time getting sound to work on the terminals. They are installed using
some 4.4 pre2 discs, and have been upgraded to the latest everyhting
using the defaults repositories in synaptic. No sound cards locally
installed, nor can there be.
    The terminals have via82xx sound chips built-in on the motherboards. I
edited lts.conf to use ESD and load the appropriate modules. The
modules seem to be loading correctly and ESD starts without error.
Listing the processes running on the terminal from the second vt shows
that esd is running. When I run "aumix-minimal -q" it returns
information about the mixer levels that seems appropriate; everything
is set to either 75% or 67%. Everything seems to be in order. When I
try "esdplay /usr/share/sounds/cardshuffle.wav" I get no sound, but it
takes a little bit to return which makes me believe the sound is going
"somewhere" and the program isn't just failing. I can duplicate these
results with either the 2.4-based terminal kernel or the 2.6 one. I
have not tried the progress patch kernel on the terminals yet.
    I have noticed that there doesn't seem to be any sort of ESD daemon
running on the server itself. Should there be? Should gnome be set to
start the sound server at startup?
    I am somewhat at a loss at this point and would appreciate any
pointers anyone could give. What else should I check?

-- 
-Regards-

Quentin Hartman
Technology Coordinator
South Lane School District
Cottage Grove, Oregon
V (541)767-3778
F (541)767-3041
www.slane.k12.or.us