On 13-06-12 08:28, Philip Loewen wrote:
Unfortunately I don't really understand how pulseaudio is supposed to
work across the network. Should a pulseaudio process be running also on
the LTSP server?

Seems like you have figured out most of it already.

See pulseaudio as a sound 'server'. It provides a way for applications to play sound. The applications connect to the pulseaudio server, and pulseaudio directs that sound to an output device (a soundcard). The pulseaudio server should therefor always be running on the machine which has access to the sound device.

In LTSP's case, applications running on the server, connect to pulseaudio running on the client, and pulseaudio there sends the audio to the local soundcard. So the pulseaudio process should be running on each client, and not on the server (unless you want to use the soundcard in the server, for whatever reason - but that's another story).

You've already found the PULSE_SERVER export - that's how the server applications know where to send their audio streams to. You can use the command 'pactl' to connect to and control the server specified in PULSE_SERVER. For example, 'pactl info' shows the status of the pulseaudio server. As you've already determined the server isn't running on your client, this will not return anything useful.

And that concludes this drive-by introduction to pulseaudio in LTSP. As for the specific problem you're having - the question you should be asking yourself is: what have you changed since the last time you ran ltsp-update-image? My experience is that usually these things do not happen 'spontaneously', despite obvious appearances.

About your error: the LTSP code that is responsible for starting the pulseaudio daemon, can be found in /opt/ltsp/<arch>/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp-init-common. You can find some pointers there, such as the exact arguments that LTSP uses to launch pulseaudio. You will see it calls pulseaudio with very different arguments than you used in your test case, therefor your test case (and any error messages you get from it) are unreliable.

From the ltsp-init-common file, you can also see that LTSP instructs pulseaudio to log to the syslog - so be sure to check /var/log/syslog on the client. That's where the pulseaudio startup error messages will be. It might be the same as your test case... but then it might just not be.

Kindest regards,

Jan Middelkoop
Recreatie en Zorg Groep B.V.

--
Website: http://www.recreatie-zorg.nl/
E-mail: j...@recreatie-zorg.nl
Telephone: +31 10 714 22 97
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