Sound was generally working fine on my Mandriva 2007 workstation, but sound in the Flash plugin was not. Here's how I debugged the problem and fixed it.

First, running Firefox from a terminal provided a great clue. To launch Firefox this way it may work to use Alt-F2 to have the run box appear, and then type "mozilla-firefox" and make sure "Run in terminal" is selected".

This should lots of ALSA-related errors, including "device not found".

By launching the Mandriva Control Center (Alt-F2 then 'mcc'), I was able to review the sound drivers in use. I navigated to "Hardware : Look and Configure Hardware" and then selected my soundcard below the "Soundcard" option. My soundcard was listed as "82801EB AC'97 Audio". From there, I could select "Run Config Tool", which provided a list of driver options. Only one of them was listed as "ALSA", so I switched the driver to that.

As part of my switch from Mandriva to Ubuntu, I had the opportunity today to contribute some improvements back to both operating systems.

Having just used Mandriva on this laptop, I knew it was possible for the sound to keep working after a suspend/resume cycle, but it quit working after the Ubuntu switch.

Since Mandriva's solution was made available under an open source license, I was able to review it adapt to work with Ubuntu, and Ubuntu can easily and legally accept this solution, if they choose.

After several years of being a satisfied user of the Mandriva Linux distribution, I've switched my laptop over to Ubuntu Linux.

The tipping point came when I couldn't get a VPN client to work on Mandriva, but Ubuntu just worked.

I had previously compared Mandriva and Ubuntu. Ubuntu looked as-good-as or better than Mandriva in every aspect except a couple of things: wireless and the laptop suspend/resume feature.

I recently developed a need to connect to a Virtual Private Network (VPN) from Linux at home. Here's the result of my experience, using both Mandriva 2007 and Ubuntu Edgy.

My retired dad runs Linux exclusively on his Thinkpad laptop. I'm front line tech support for him.

He lives a few hours away, so I don't always know exactly what he's experiencing with his laptop, or how a particular problem arose, of which there have been few.

Here's the solution I found for a recently reported problem opening PDFs on Mandriva Linux with Firefox.

I've been a satisfied Mandriva User since 9.2 was released some years ago. Currently, Mandriva 2006 works rather well on my ThinkPad T20 laptop. Recently I became interested in Ubuntu as well, evaluated both Mandriva 2007 and Ubuntu Edgy as possible upgrade paths.

I installed them both on test machines and have following observations about how they compared.

Kurt had just purchased two wireless PCI cards, one for a Linux desktop and one for a Windows desktop. Sitting side-by-side, we started at the same time to try to get the new hardware to work with each OS. Kurt was working on Windows while I was working on Linux. If I got Linux working first, Kurt would give me a bowl of ice cream.

The process with Mandriva Linux 2005 could have hardly been easier. I went to the the Mandriva Control Center and followed the wizard to set up a new network connection. There was option to select a Windows driver. From there, I pop-ed in the CD from D-Link and navigated to the driver to select it. For the rest of the wizard I could mostly accept the default options.

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 mentioned earlier that Kurt was trying Edubuntu 5.10 as alternative to the Mandriva Linux 2006 distribution. The latest report is that Kurt will most likely return to using Mandriva. However, during the days of using Edubuntu, we both found a number of things we preferred about it.

I thought it would be of interest to some folks to see the details of what seemed better in Edubuntu, and what factors went into a switching back.

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!