[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio automatic startup

[Colin Guthrie]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 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.


On experimentation in Mandriva we've found a few problems with the
launching via esdcompat. As pulse takes longer to initialise than esd
did, the timeouts for starting "esd" are no longer accurate and this
leads to a few issues (e.g. login sound not playing etc.). One super
fast hardware this is not a major issue but for a lot of ppl it is.

We found that by using xinit.d to start pulse (which also works for all
desktops, not just Gnome & E) it was more reliable and even if esdcompat
was run by gnome-session, pulse had already initialised and all was well.

YMMV but I thought I'd report it back.

Col