audio, Mageia 2, KDE, Acer/DeTOS NoMachine thin client

[pfaff]

My environment consists of:

- a host running Mageia 2 Linux
- an Acer Veriton 2110G thin client workstation running DevonIT DeTOS 7.x.y (7.1.1 and 7.2.1 tested so far)
- free NoMachine installed on Mageia 2 host (version 3.5.0-7 of nxclient, nxnode, nxserver rpms)
- NoMachine UNIX KDE connection from thin client desktop to Mageia 2 host

Under DeTOS 7.1.1 when NoMachine connection is being established the following error message is displayed:

Multimedia
Can't start audio server.
Do you want to disable sounds and continue?
Ok Cancel

After clicking Ok to continue the KDE desktop starts and works fine but without audio.

Under DeTOS 7.2.1 the warning message above is not displayed but everything else appears to be working the same.

I've tried following the procedure documented here:

http://www.nomachine.com/ar/view.php?ar_id=AR11E00491

but that fails with the following messages logged in syslog:

May 14 11:16:22 root pulseaudio[27464]: [pulseaudio] module-esound-sink.c: read() failed: EOF
May 14 11:16:22 root pulseaudio[27464]: [pulseaudio] module-loopback.c: No such sink.
May 14 11:16:22 root pulseaudio[27464]: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-loopback" (argument: "source=auto_null.monitor sink=nxaudio"): initialization failed.

Thus I don't yet have the full audio stack working: KDE -> Phonon -> Gstreamer -> Pulseaudio -> ESounD -> thin client.

I'm thinking about using some program to at least test the ESounD connection from the Mageia host to the NoMachine thin client.

The ESounD software (see http://www.tux.org/~ricdude/overview.html) has an esdcat program that should do the trick.
With esdcat I believe I could do something like this, bypassing the KDE sound stack:

esdcat -s $ESPEAKER < audiofile

and then if the NoMachine ESounD server is working properly I should hear audiofile at my thin client.

I've built esound-0.3.3 from source and run esdcat as above and it runs without errors but produces no sound.

If anyone has any helpful ideas I'd be happy to hear them.

Thanks!