Getting sound to work on thin clients can be a little tricky. Without some extra care taken the sound will often come out of the speakers on the server instead of the client.

Most of the want I learned in the process of setting up my own thin client I contributed to the LTSP wiki documentation about sound, so I won't repeat those technical details here.

In summary, I was able to get sound working to my satisfaction on the thin client for applications that seemed key: the Flash browser plugin and the Amarok music player. I did have a problem with hearing sounds from the Gaim chat program played twice. That didn't seem critical and I haven't tried to track it down yet.

As an afterthought, I tested the "mplayer plug-in", which I also use in the browser. It worked fine on the thin client without any configuration at all.

What I learned from the process is a technical detail about how sound servers work. As a KDE user, I became familiar that "artsd" was my sound server. I was surprised to find that it was relatively easy to use a different sound server with satisfactory results. I switched to using "esd", because it can send sound over the network, which the thin client requires. Amarok, Flash, and Gaim were able to work with "esd" with little effort.

(If you need a test file to see if sound works with your Flash plugin, I recommend the Sysadmin Song

For my next adventure, I'll test that I can USB drives and CD-ROMs to work on the thin client. Like setting up sound, extra care is needed because the CPU handling these devices is now across the network rather than directly attached to the devices.