[K12OSN] Do anyone here REALLY understand LTSP and remote sound?

[William Fragakis]

I don't understand it but I can point provide you with a bit of insight
gleaned from my bumps and bruises. the ltsp wiki audio section can be
very helpful btw.

On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 22:11 -0500, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:

> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I have been hacking at my sound issue for the better part of 3 days
> now and
> I hope someone can point me in the right direction.
> 
> -problem 1: sound only for root and only on the server itself
> -problem 2: thin clients don't see ANY sound card (in Gnome) under
> Preferences>Sound unless I do chmod -R 777 /dev/dsp and chmod -R 777
> /dev/snd and then they ONLY see the servers Sound card after reboot.
> Sound
because (drum roll....), remember, unless you are doing local apps,
everything is running on the server, so when running sound card
detection, you are running it on the server.

> has NEVER worked for ANY of the several clients I have tried to use.
> 
> Sound seems like a VERY difficult nut to crack. 
Not really. We have 8 yr old Compaq desktops and brand new thin clients
with sound. If you are using GNOME, make sure you are using esd in
lts.conf and commented out nasd.

When the client boots, right before the display is enabled, see if it
recognizes and initiates (right word?) the sound card. If it only says
something like sound card not detected, choose correct sound module or
something similar (my coffee and memory haven't kicked in this morning)
you need to list the sound card in the lts.conf file. Most Sound Blaster
cards are auto recognized though. If yours isn't, google around as lots
of folks have posted various permutations especially with laptops which
seem particularly finicky as clients. Many older PCs with built-in sound
actually use the ISA configuration that's commented out in lts.conf even
though the motherboard has only PCI slots. We were wonderfully surprised
when a bunch of old Compaqs barked to life with their little built-in
speakers recently. 

If all else fails, cheap $5 SB-compatible PCI cards from newegg.com work
fine.

Once you have the sound card recognized, then go on each client and
(again, drum roll) enable sound in the preferences. It's easy to miss
this step. Also, look at the ltsp wiki and understand how to turn sound
on with Flash. It's well explained there.

You don't really need to understand the idea of sound servers, etc to
get sound working. Understanding it does give you an idea of the
challenge the ltsp develops had when they began, though.

Regards,
William

> I see lots of requests that
> never seem to have resolutions on this list. Is there anyone here who
> feels
> like they REALLY understand whats going on with remote  sound? This
> isn't a
> challenge, just a question, because I feel very much in the dark (and
> of
> course if you say 'YES' I am going to start asking you questions! :-)
> 
> Should I take this to the LTSP list or the LTSP IRC channel?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> John