[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio automatic startup

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 01.02.08 14:44, Jim Duda (jim at duda.tzo.com) 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.

The idea is to run PA from gnome-session via its compatiblity script
"esdcompat" which is linked to /usr/bin/esd. To make this work you
have to enable the ESD check box in the gnome sound properties
however. For new installations this is enabled by default.

> 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?

Some pople have posted init scripts for this. I have none available
right now, however.

> 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?

No, ALSA supports SPDIF, and thus we do to. However, PA is not able to
discover spdif support automatically, thus you might need to load the
module-alsa-sink module manually once for the "spdif:" ALSA device.
On some souncards it is sufficient to play around with some ALSA mixer
settings, however.

Lennart

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