[Pkg-ltsp-devel] Bug#425057: ltsp-server: Sound does not work "out of box" and no instructions for making it work

[vagrant at freegeek.org]

On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 01:30:39PM -0600, Bryan Sutula wrote:
> After installing ltsp-server and getting clients to run, sound does not work
> on the clients.  Within the package, I'm not finding any notes or pointers
> to other documentation for getting sound to work.

right. we definitely need to document it. we should consider enabling it
by default, though not all users will want it enabled.
 
> The two main things I needed to do to enable sound were:
> 
> 1) Add "SOUND = Y" to /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf
 
> Note that this file isn't there by default, so the user might want to copy
> it from /opt/ltsp/i386/usr/share/doc/ltsp-client/examples as a starting
> point.  However, they probably want to comment out all the lines and start
> with an empty [Default] section.

right. the theory was the default behavior should not require an
lts.conf... but it confuses everybody so we'll probably start creating
one anyways. :)
 
> 2) Within the chroot, install several packages.  I don't know if this is
> the right set, but this is what worked.  (I'd love feedback if I have
> installed the wrong things.)
> 
> sudo chroot /opt/ltsp/i386 apt-get update
> sudo chroot /opt/ltsp/i386 apt-get install alsa-oss alsa-base alsa-utils
...snip...

probably don't need all of these. i will look into it when i get a
chance.

i'm wondering if switching to libesd-alsa0 in the chroot would work
instead? though i think there's some ltsp scripts that stupidly check
for /dev/dsp ... so we'd have to fix those too.

> The addition of these packages does increase the client's footprint.
> Previously, a top(1) showed memory usage of 47748k.  After these sound
> packages are installed, memory usage increased to 48904K.

yes, well, it requires running an additional daemon, so that's not a
huge surprise. :)
 
> Additionally, one could point users to:
>   http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/Sound
> 
> It is difficult, though, because most of the instructions at ltsp.org
> are written for a manual install of LTS.  The Debian packaging is nice,
> but it becomes difficult for a user to tell what it's done, and how much
> of the lts.org documentation is applicable.

wiki.ltsp.org is primarily for older ltsp 4.x versions at this point.

there is also http://wiki.debian.org/LTSP where you could add
documentation. maybe add a sound section to LTSP/Howto if it's a short
set of instructions, or create a separate page and link to it in the
howto. then we can clean up the wiki content and include it in the
package documentation.

thanks for the report and suggestions on how to get it to work.

live well,
  vagrant