With the aid of PulseAudio it’s possible to remotely host applications such as Pidgin and still have sound enabled (something that’s very handy with an IM client for notification purposes).
First, on the client and server, you’ll need to make sure PulseAudio is installed (it should be there by default in Ubuntu 10.10 if that’s your client), for the client you can install all you need like this:
#apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils paprefs
And for the server:
#apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils
Then on the client allow network access to the local sound devices (you can open the preferences by typing “papref” at console or going to “System | Preferences | PulseAudio Preferences”):
(Security Note: The port being used (TCP/4713) is blocked by the firewall on this machine to anything but LocalHost, you should do the same)
Then, when we connect to the server, we want to enable X11 forwarding and setup a reverse tunnel to allow us to send sounds to the client, we do this like so:
#ssh -X R 4713:127.0.0.1:4713
Start up Pidgin:
#pidgin &
Then change the sound preferences to use “paplay” to play the sounds down the reverse tunnel:
And there we go, job done.
I like to have Pidgin running on a virtual machine at home to prevent any monitoring of my IM communications when at work, on-site or using an untrusted network.