[pulseaudio-discuss] system-wide daemon

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and olin.pulse.7ia at shivers.mail0.org at 09/02/10 00:11
did gyre and gimble:
> OK, so that's X11. I cannot figure out what PA's mechanism for this is. I sort
> of get the sense, from this per-user-login server model that PA has the
> horrible one-persone/one-computer model of "the person at the console is the
> person using the computer," which was inflicted on the world by Microsoft
> Windows. If so, this is a real design error, one that doesn't sync up with
> Unix, which has always had a multi-user model of the world.

For X11, PA will follow where the physical *person* is. Even if the App
itself is running remotely, the user is seeing the app on a local
screen. And PA supports exactly the same principle but for sound. Even
tho' the App is running remotely, any sound it produces is heard
*locally*, not remotely.

There is nothing wrong with me logging into my colleagues machine and
running e.g. RhythmnBox on his machine. He currently has full, exclusive
access to his machine's sound hardware, but by virtue of my local
machine running PA and his machine being configured for PA output from
applications, I just SSH in and run the application and the sound it
produces and the display it draws are both heard/seen on *my* computer.
It does not interfere with his computer in any way (other than using
some CPU cycles!) and I never even ask to use his sound h/w.

I've written about the various X11 scenarios here:
http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/08/sound-on-linux-is-confusing-defuzzing-part-2-pulseaudio/

perhaps that'll help explain things a bit.

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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