local apps how-to

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 3:03 PM, Warren Togami <wtogami at redhat.com> wrote:
> Robert Arkiletian wrote:
>>>
>>> It is possible that more environment variables are needed to direct a
>>> local
>>> app to use the pulseaudio daemon.  You might want to check with upstream,
>>> I
>>> recall they tackled this recently.
>>
>> Tried googling for these environment variables but couldn't find them.
>> I only tried
>> FIREFOX_DSP="padsp"
>> in
>> ~/.mozilla/firefox/rc
>> but that didn't work.
>
> No, it would be LTSP local apps specific environment variables.


Update:
Just to test local app sound I tried ogg123. I am able to play ogg123
as a local app with sound perfectly.


>
>>
>>> Also make sure you are using the LATEST builds of ldm, ltspfs and ltsp on
>>> both your server and client chroot.  Latest builds were yesterday.
>>>
>>
>> Can I make sure I have these by doing a yum update inside and outside
>> of the chroot?
>
> I don't know if the latest ldm and ltspfs have hit Fedora 9 updates yet.
>  But soon, yes.



Got them. ldm is updated in the chroot and ltspfs is updated outside.



>
>>
>>>> Unfortunately,  I still could not get flash to work with sound. In
>>>> addition, launching firefox on a 1.4GHz Athlon with 256MB client with
>>>> a 100mbps connection takes over 30 seconds.
>>>>
>>> Over 30 seconds the first time, or even subsequent times on the same
>>> user?
>>>
>>
>> I have something interesting to report:
>> With 256MB on client firefox was not any faster launching it the
>> second time around but after I upgraded to 512MB the second launch
>> went down to 3-4 seconds from an initial 30. So it seems for firefox
>> to be kept in cache locally, 256 is not enough.


Amazingly Good news :)
after doing a yum update inside and outside the chroot (new ldm and
ltspfs) the initial launch of firefox 3.0.2 is now down to 6 sec.!!!
Initially couldn't believe this so I verified it twice. Once with soft
boot and once with hard boot and different users.

Subsequent launches take 3 seconds.


>>
>> BTW is the firefox binary downloaded to the client through ssh or nfs?
>>
>
> nfs, which is pretty slow.  It seems like most of the slowness of launching
> firefox is because it is downloading a large number of large executables.
>  You might be able to improve the perceived launch speed by using NBD
> instead of NFS root (supported in Fedora LTSP5 for a while but not
> documented.)  Also preloading files into client's RAM using something like
> readahead with a custom config file might help.  But I have just now learned
> that readahead was removed from Fedora a release ago.  Hmm...


-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada
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