[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio as a systemwide deamon and as the default ALSA plugin doesn't seem to work right.... ?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 15.11.07 02:05, Kevin Williams (kevkim55 at gmail.com) wrote:

> I have installed pulseaudio from the cvs repo and have configure the PA daemon 
> to run as a system wide instance. To ensure all the apps work without needing 
> to configure each of them individually, I have set the pulseaudio as the 
> default ALSA plugin in /etc/asound.conf following the guide "Perfect Setup". 
> 
> PA lauches without any problems. But, the problem shows up when I launch any 
> of the multimedia apps. Sometimes, I see a message which says "Audio device 
> not available. May be it is in use by another application". I'm pretty sure, 
> there're no other apps at that same time yet, I receive those messages, don't 
> know why !??

If you set up PA as a system-wide instance you need to configure
things differently than when using it per-session. If you run it as
system-wide daemon than you are expected to understand very well what
is happening. I do not recommend to run it as system daemon.

I know that Gentoo sets up PA this way. This is against my
recommendation. The only use case for running PA as system-wide
instance is thin clients, where the users using PA are not local. If
that's the only focus of Gentoo than great. But the last time I looked
this wasn't quite the only focus of Gentoo. ;-)

If you use PA this way then local authentication works by membership
in the group pulse-rt. What you described sounds like authentication
errors. So please make sure that all users who try to access PA are in
that group.

Again, if you use PA as system daemon, then it is your own fault if
things don't work as expected. You are expected to know what you do if
you run PA in this mode.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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