2 questions - ltsp sound and unreliable booting

[Rob Shugg]

Hey
I am just setting up a pilot thin client lab for my kids school and I
hit a couple of snags. The first on is sound on the thin client- the
sound works on logging in and I can get other system sounds to work
but so far totem, xmms,real player, beep media player and VLC media
player dont work - no complaints from any of these - just silence.
if I mouse over an mp3 file on the desktop it will stat playing and it
also appears that rythmbox works as well. I have tested all the
options in sound preferences and the only one that works is ESD - all
the others fail silently.

The other problem I am having is unreliable booting of the thin
client. it can take up to three power cycles to fully boot the client-
it either hangs just after the progress bar starts moving on the
edubuntu boot screen or it boots successfully. How do I debug this
sort of thing are there any kernel messages on the thin client? if so
where are they.

Any help on these issues would be great as I really want to put the
best foot forward for edubuntu when presenting this to the school.

Details
edubuntu 6.10
thin client IBM pc 300gl with pxe boot

rob