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.

Over the weekend I continued my exploration of Linux thin clients.

Now that I had a proof-on-concept system working, I spent my computer time using the thin client, to see if there was anything to observe from "real life" use.

The performance was perfect. I could not perceive any lag time compared to sitting directly at my server computer.

The memory usage was also impressively low. I ran a second KDE desktop on the server, and the system reported "42% memory free", and I have only 256 Megs of memory!

I'm continuing to research a preferred thin client solution for Linux. After not being completely satisfied with Edubuntu and drakTermServ, I tried installing LTSP on Mandriva.

LTSP does not currently have a package that is made specifically for Mandriva, but it was simple enough to follow the Mandriva-specific steps outlined on the LTSP site.

Part of the package includes a tool called ltspadmin, which eased the necessary configuration. It runs in a text console rather than graphically, but I found it to be a more useful tool than the graphical drakTermServ tool available from Mandriva.

In my continuing quest to learn more about Linux terminal servers, I tried out drakTermServ, a solution provided by Mandriva, a favorite desktop Linux distribution vendor.

drakTermServ seems promising. It uses a nice graphical wizard to set up a computer as a terminal server. Distinctive features include generating kernels and boot files for the clients based on the server, and using clusternfs as a novel way for clients to make customizations.

All that promise sucked me in for several hours before I concluded that drakTermServ really fails to deliver the basics (I never got it working), and is likely a dead-end project.

I just tried out Edubuntu after reading that it works "out of the box" as a Linux Terminal Server. And with the documented caveats, it did.

The overall experience was rather impressive. To set up the terminal server, I simply went through the installation wizard and entered some basic networking details.

I was then immediately able to turn a second computer into a Edubuntu thin client by simply selecting a "boot from network" option when the second computer started up.