[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sat, 02.01.10 16:03, Bill Cox (waywardgeek at gmail.com) wrote:

> Hi, Col.  I'm willing to try the aproach you suggest, but I'd like to
> debate the implementation some more.  If I understand correctly, I can
> use CK to determine whenever the sound card permissions are moved to a
> new user (which is basically whenever a user takes over the "seat",
> except as root), and can then launch the various accessibility apps
> the user needs as that user.  

CK will inform you about session switches. However it won't run
applications for you as the user. 

More importantly, it is generally not recommended to really watch CK
if all you really are interested to get notifications when access to
the audio device comes and goes away for your user. If you want to do
that, then watch the device access modes directly via inotify() and
access(). That is far from trivial however, because ALSA has an entire
farm of device nodes, and watching them correctly and race-free is
kinda hard. 

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4