[K12OSN] Specify the correct sound module, onboard video settings, a new school year, and an update on RMSEL

[Rita Gibson]

Hello everyone:

We are getting ready for the new school year to start next week. Our 
biggest news this year is that teachers want  even more computers in 
their rooms. The past two years we've made sure every teacher had at 
least four, and sometimes six in each classroom. The past two years have 
gone so well, hardly any downtime, everything has been working 
beautifully. We had $11,000 left in our budget from last school year 
because of k12ltsp, and the improvements we've made to the entire system 
over the last five years, so we were able to add some additional wiring 
to three classrooms and we are installing "mini-labs" in them. Two 
middle school humanities classrooms will have 8 computers each, and the 
high school Science & Technology class will have 16 computers. Of course 
I have been on the hunt all summer for smaller machines to put into 
these classrooms and found that I really like the small Dell GX150  -- 
with the pxe boot capability, the USB ports right on the front, they 
configure beautifully, sound is detected on boot, making them really 
easy to drop into the building, plus the computer tables aren't so 
crowded in the classrooms. Well, they are my favorite computer for RMSEL 
right now. A lot of them seem to be on the shelf at the recylers right now.

Someone donated four Dell GX60 desktops, which look just like the GX150s 
-- I thought I was going to tear my hair out getting sound and video to 
work properly. Sound has become an absolute must now because of all the 
web-based educational programs out there. We are a K-12 school.

I learned two things yesterday that will help me in the future:  Since 
the sound module wasn't detected automatically and none of the sound 
modules I had previously had to specify with other difficult 
workstations were correct, I went to the Dell website to find what type 
of soundcard came with that model. (More precisely what chipset was 
used.) "Analog Devices ADI 198x Integrated Audio" was listed under audio 
driver downloads. I googled that with the word chipset and found some 
discussion that said this was a common Intel chipset that was used on 
lots of laptops and other desktops with onboard sound and video. I 
didn't know where there was a listing of the sound modules for ltsp, but 
decided to read thoroughly everything that was posted on the wiki about 
sound. I found a paper on the wiki about getting sound to work that 
referenced this file:  /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/audiolist.   Bingo! I found 
the sound module listed for Intel  Corporation and I set SMODULE_01 =  
i810_audio and it worked on reboot!

Is it possible to reference this file, audiolist, in the "lts.conf" 
file. I know there are too many sound modules to include a listing like 
you do for the XSERVER drivers (which is a huge help when you have a 
video card that won't configure automatically, you can look at the label 
on the chipset and find the correct module in lts.conf), but just to 
know that the file audiolist is there and where it lives would have been 
great information to have had long ago. I've struggled before with 
getting the right sound modules and stumbled on the right one in an 
email post. But I was never so glad to find this file. Many thanks to 
the author of this document (document says it was last updated June 25, 
2003) on the wiki: 
http://www.k12ltsp.org/phpwiki/index.php/Technical%3ASound in which it 
states:  "The first thing this script will do is attempt to load any 
sound modules which have been defined (SMODULE_0? = ????) in lts.conf. 

If no sound modules were manually specified, or the ones specified did 
not load properly, the rc.sound script probes the PCI bus and tries to 
load the modules for any sound cards it finds (as defined in 
/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/audiolist). " YEAH!!


My next challenge with the GX60 was the video -- the screen on two of 
them displayed normally, and on two the login screen was huge and when I 
logged into the desktop everything was huge. I tried setting the desktop 
manually to 1024x768 but that didn't work. I went into the bios settings 
and discovered that when I increased the ram from 1 MB to 8 MB (the 
maximum) in the onboard devices > video settings the desktop looked 
great. I also turned some video setting to ENABLED that had been 
DISABLED ( I can't remember what it was, but it made sense to at least 
try it, and it improved the appearance of the video so I went with it).

I know the above information might be very basic to some of you, but 
hopefully this will save someone some time.

Have a great school year everyone,

Rita Gibson
RMSELTech

P.S. If you haven't done so already, check out Steve Hargadon's 
interviews about k12ltsp and linux in schools at 
http://www.K12OpenSource.com/interviews  I would love to see our 
district embrace k12ltsp -- I wonder if I could get one of the big 
honchos to listen in?