[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio automatic startup

[Colin Guthrie]

Jim Duda wrote:
> I'm using pulseaudio 0.9.6, on Fedora 7 installed via yum.
> I'm current having to start pulseaudio -D manually.
> 
> Three Questions:
> 1) Should pulseaudio startup automatically somehow when someone logs into X?
> If so, how does this work?  I've read all the docs, etc, but haven't found my answer.

Nope. Even in pa 0.9.9 this isn't handled by pulse directly.

There are two methods officially supported (more on this in a bit):
1) Use auto-spawn to automatically launch the pa server when a client
tries to connect - this is very flaky and generally not recommenced it
seems.

2) Use the /usr/bin/esdcompat method - this involveds removing
/usr/bin/esd and replacing it with /usr/bin/esdcompat (e.g. via
symlink). This will tell Gnome or Enlightenment to start pulse
automatically on login.

Personally I prefer to put a script in my /etc/X11/xinit.d folder that
runs on login and checks a config file (/etc/sysconfig/pulseaudio) to
see if the user has configured pulseaudio auto-startup. This is how I
package the Mandriva pulseaudio.

> 2) I need to run pulseaudio on some diskless server machines which don't run X or have anyone login.
> As such, I need to run pulseaudio as either a system daemon or some phantom user.
> Is there a recommended approach to starting pulseaudio on a X-less machine, i.e., rc script?

Not really, but it's fairly simple, you can just create a /etc/init.d/
script and start it that way. Phantom user with a suitibly tweaked
default.pa to allow IP ACL based connections is probably what you want
(that's what I do on a similar setup at work).

> 3) I've read in a couple of posts that pulseaudio can be used with an spdif output.  Did that support
> start with some version after 0.9.6?

Dunno anything about that one, sorry. You should be able to configure
the default.pa to use the passthrough alsa device I would have thought
tho' (but I'm no expert on spdif generally).

HTHs

Col