Pulse Audio On HP Thin Clients

Yesterday we had a conference call with HP and worked out a plan to have Pulseaudio built and installed on our HP t5725 thin clients. This was always a phase 2 goal, and now that the thin clients are installed, this is my primary project. I have been impressed with Pulse so far. Sound on Linux is horribly inconsistent (Alsa, OSS, ESD and NAS anyone?) and difficult to deploy. Various applications support different sound libraries, and what Pulse does is support enough of them to allow most things to just work. We hope to deploy this sometime in October or November.

Here is the only change I had to make so far:
protocol-esound.c
74c74
< #define MAX_CACHE_SAMPLE_SIZE (1024000) ---
> #define MAX_CACHE_SAMPLE_SIZE (2048000)

Increasing this cache allowed the standard login.wav GNOME sound file to play over Esound. Some of these probably should be environmental variables or settings, so that they do not require a recompile.

Our biggest sound requirements have been resolved:
Esound handles GNOME login sounds and other Linux applications
OSS is handled with the padsp binary, this allows Citrix clients to play all of the sounds from Microsoft Windows apps.
PulseAudio is handling the shockwave plugin in Firefox, and also works natively with Xine to allow playback of Windows Media, Quicktime and Real content. For grins I'm also testing remote display of TV tuners and DVD playback.

Here is a simplified diagram of multiple servers and applications all redirecting sound to the thin client and it coming out the attached speakers.