2 questions - ltsp sound and unreliable booting

[Rob Shugg]

Gavin
Thanks for these details, I'll test these out tonight and report back.
I did do a bit more probing on the boot issue and i think its related
to NFS mounting failures but I dont have the details with me at the
moment.

Rob

On 13/11/06, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 13 Nov 2006, Rob Shugg wrote:
>
> > The first on is sound on the thin client- the sound works on logging in
> > and I can get other system sounds to work but so far totem, xmms,real
> > player, beep media player and VLC media player dont work - no complaints
> > from any of these - just silence.  if I mouse over an mp3 file on the
> > desktop it will stat playing and it also appears that rythmbox works as
> > well. I have tested all the options in sound preferences and the only one
> > that works is ESD - all the others fail silently.
>
> As you probably already understand, all of these applications are running
> on the server so in the normal run of things, they send their output to the
> sound card on the server.  In the case of sound on thin clients, the
> program is told that it must play through esd across the network to the
> thin client.  It seems likely that some applications are aware of this and
> some are still trying to play through the local sound card.
>
> You could test this theory by putting speakers in the server sound card and
> checking do you get sound through that.
>
> As I understand it, the general way to instruct applications to play
> through ESD is to set the ESPEAKER environment variable.  Perhaps you might
> try this to investigate what's going on:
>
> 1. Start a terminal.
> 2. Type:
>         echo $ESPEAKER
>    if it replies <thinclientip>:<portnumber> it's correct, otherwise
>    something may be wrong.
> 3. Try starting some of the problem applications direct from the command
>    line and see does sound work.
> 4. If the ESPEAKER is not set, set it with
>         export ESPEAKER=192.168.0.143:16001
>    where the thin client ip is 192.168.0.143 and the esd port number is
>    16001 (I'm not sure what the port number usually is but this is probably
>    a reasonable guess).
> 5. Try the applications again from the command line and see does [4] help.
>
> You can certainly point xmms/beep direct at your esound daemon by hand,
> under the output plugins you can tell it to use esound output, with ip and
> port number.  It should really respond to the environment variable though.
> I suspect you can probably configure vlc and totem similarly.
>
> It would be interesting to get a list of those apps which you find ignore
> the environment variable.
>
> > The other problem I am having is unreliable booting of the thin
> > client. it can take up to three power cycles to fully boot the client-
> > it either hangs just after the progress bar starts moving on the
> > edubuntu boot screen or it boots successfully. How do I debug this
> > sort of thing are there any kernel messages on the thin client? if so
> > where are they.
>
> I'm not sure about this, there should be some way to get it to boot in a
> "verbose" mode, but I'm still in ubuntu dapper which is a little more
> talkative at boot time so I haven't had to do this.  Does any text appear
> at all?
>
> Gavin
>
>
>
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