[pulseaudio-discuss] Finally got it! was: Re: Pulseaudio - no sound

[Jim Carter]

On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Stefan Czinczoll wrote:

> Got it running at the end! The clue was to start pulseaudio not as user, 
> but as root...

> $ pulseaudio --daemonize
> [WARN 11203] polkit-session.c:144:polkit_session_set_uid(): session != NULL
>  Not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace
> E: polkit.c: Cannot set UID on session object.
> etc.

I think a better solution is probably to cause yourself to have the needed 
privileges.  In my case (with PulseAudio-0.9.6, SuSE 10.2, PolicyKit-0.2) 
it was sufficient to put my own loginID in the pulse-rt group, i.e. 
/etc/group says:
    pulse-rt:!:601:pulse,root,jimc

It would be much more sanitary to work through HAL, resmgr and/or PolicyKit 
so all relevant users have the privilege, but other issues (Bluetooth) 
have been holding me back from working more on PulseAudio, so I can't 
tell you exactly what to do.  It's not clear to me whether we want to allow 
only the console user to raise priority, or whether we recognize that any
user on a shared execution server potentially could run a PA process 
delivering audio across the net to his workstation, and so potentially 
could need realtime priority.  (It's better in all ways if he would run the 
PA process and the player on his own workstation, and bring in the media by 
NFS or equivalent.)

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet;  6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555
Email: jimc at math.ucla.edu  http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)