[K12OSN] Discussion on sound (not meant as a rant)

[John Lucas]

On Friday 19 January 2007 11:46, David Hopkins wrote:
> All,
>
> It appears that sound works for some and not for others.  Unfortunately, I
> appear to be firmly in the 'not for others' camp most days.  Now, this
> issue has come to a head here at NCS.  I have been told to either get sound
> working by February 16th (flash, movies in various formats like real
> player, media player,etc) or else NCS will find a different approach. In
> other words, a MS-based solution.  What is pushing this is that teachers
> have decided (and management has agreed) that the school should be using
> UnitedStreaming and a contract has been signed.  Now, I have to have sound.
>
> So, I have a couple of weekends to try and get this fixed.  I am at FC5.  I
> can upgrade to FC6 is absolutely necessary, but even then there are issues
> with the installer recognizing my RAID card (2010s).
>
> Currently, I have sound with the edutainment apps.  It can be a little
> laggy at times, but ... it works.  I am re-installing mplayer, hoping that
> doing so will get the movies working (using info from the list and the
> wiki).  And that leaves flash and shockwave.  Shockwave is a non-starter
> (well, maybe with wine, but ... purchasing codeweavers might work, but is
> cost-prohibitive since doing so gets into the same price range as an
> MS-based solution).  As recent email to the list suggests, flash 9 is also
> having problems. So ... if anyone has success stories and are willing to
> take the time to add them to the wiki, I suspect alot of others on the list
> (besides just me) would find it very useful.
>

As long as you have basic ESD sound working you should be able to get the the 
other critical applications running. I don't know where you got mplayer from, 
but when I installed it, it did not have ESD support compiled into the RPMs, 
so I had to build my own from sources. To illustrate, here is the initial 
result from the "mplayer -ao help" command:

	[jlucas at coyote ~]$ mplayer -ao help
	MPlayer 1.0pre8-Fedora-GS-4.0.2 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
	CPU:               Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.70GHz (Family: 15, Model: 1,
	Stepping: 2)
	CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
	Compiled with runtime CPU detection.


	Available audio output drivers:
	        mpegpes DVB audio output
	        oss     OSS/ioctl audio output
	        alsa    ALSA-0.9.x-1.x audio output
	        null    Null audio output
	        pcm     RAW PCM/WAVE file writer audio output

After installing the required "devel" libraries (for alsa, pulse, esound etc.) 
and compiling mplayer from the source tarball, it looks like this:

	[root at ltsp ~]# mplayer -ao help
	MPlayer 1.0pre8-4.1.1 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
	CPU:               Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.70GHz (Family: 15, Model: 1,
	Stepping: 2)
	CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
	Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2

	Available audio output drivers:
	        mpegpes DVB audio output
	        oss     OSS/ioctl audio output
	        alsa    ALSA-0.9.x-1.x audio output
	        esd     EsounD audio output
	        sdl     SDLlib audio output
	        null    Null audio output
	        pcm     RAW PCM/WAVE file writer audio output

Unless the support is there, it will never work. Gettin mplayer gives you 
Windows Media, Quicktime, Real and other critical content working.

The other important application is Flash9. You need to compile the support 
addon from RevolutionLinux:

	http://pulseaudio.revolutionlinux.com/PulseAudio

I have both Mplayer and Flash9 working on K12LTSP v5 (LTSP v4.2u4). It *can* 
be done. It is way important to carefully follow the troubleshooting 
instructions for LTSP sound on the wiki without skipping any steps.

> Next, my version of LTSP still has the 'only works for first user' issue.
>

I do hope you are using unique logins and not trying to use the same account 
for more than one user; that wouldn't work and would explain this symptom.

> An upgrade is in order.  Is there a simple way to upgrade just LTSP without
> breaking the customizations which K12LTSP uses (and which make life alot
> simpler in many respects)?
>

What are you intending to upgrade? If all you want is to upgrade LTSP, then 
dowload the latest "ltspadmin" and upgrade. If you want to upgrade the base 
OS, you *could* use K12LTSP v6 (which used Fedora Core 6 as it's base), but 
at this late date, you might have to completely start over, since it 
represents a major departure from previous LTSP versions (using muekow 
instead of a separate LTSP distribution). I haven't tried it yet myself, so 
seek those with greater experience with the new version.

> Finally, pulseaudio, asla, esd, nasd, gstreamer etc have been mentioned as
> possible solutions to the 'sound issue', but currently it appears that
> there isn't a firm solution.  I have been trying to get a solid solution
> for literally a few years now.  I have had sound working at varous times,
> but then it would lag so severely in videos as to be useless. 
> Powers-that-be want (demand) a solution by February 16th.  Since I can't
> work on the systems during the day, I have weekends and some evenings.  I
> am willing to try any suggestions this  weekend.  I am not a Linux guru,
> but am also not completely new to this.
>

I stuck with ESD because it is the best documented and I got it working first 
try, even though I am aware of some of it's shortcomings. I would love to try 
Pulseaudio, but I will wait for the tools and documentation to mature. Same 
story with muekow, I'll wait for things to shake down; I don't mind being on 
the "trailing edge". Early adoption and life on the "bleeding edge" is too 
nerve-wracking for me.

> Sincerely,
> Dave Hopkins
> NCS parent volunteer

Good Luck Dave

-- 
        "History doesn't repeat itself; at best it rhymes."
                        - Mark Twain

| John Lucas                          MrJohnLucas at gmail.com               |
| St. Thomas, VI 00802                http://mrjohnlucas.googlepages.com/ |
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