MAS is finally added to freedesktop.org!!

Alan Cox alan at redhat.com
Wed Dec 24 20:08:02 UTC 2003


On Wed, Dec 24, 2003 at 12:27:22PM -0600, Steve Bergman wrote:
> If it *does* use the display variable, that would be reason enough in
> itself to use it instead of esd and arts.

esd does - but it is disabled by default.

> The first question remote desktop users ask me is why their speakers
> don't work.  It's embarrassing to have to say that it's because we're
> using Linux.  I've taken to avoiding the whole subject by not even
> taking them out of the box.

This isn't well documented stuff unfortunately. 

esd supports remote audio, just not the way it comes out of the box. ESD
aware clients will try to connect to port 16001 on the host running esd. 

The minimal setup with a trusted network and NFS home directories is to add

	-tcp -public 

to esd and run the command "esdctl unlock" to allow remote clients.


If you use ssh for remote X sessions then a better approach is 

	-tcp

and use ssh port forwarding to forward 127.0.0.1:16001 to 127.0.0.1:16001
so that the audio session is also across ssh only. In this case you will also
need NFS or to propogate ~/.esd_auth. 

With multiple users you need to pick port numbers for the sessions, so
export ESPEAKER=127.0.0.1:portnum and redirect that to 16001 on the client via
ssh.

Its all rather convoluted but it is possible to wrap ssh up nicely as an
app with a name like "xremote" that runs a script the other end to set up stuff
then runs the remote app.

The port forwarding trick also works nicely with vnc - where you tunnel the vnc
session one way and the esd port back.

Alan





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