[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio apps (Audacious) over SSH

[John Lane]

Thanks for that explanation, Col, that was useful. I had found out about 
xprop but hadn't noticed the differences between the working X session 
and the non-working SSH session and I never knew you could set 
PULSE_SERVER as an environment variable so that's all useful stuff.

Both sessions on the same box and both sessions logged on as the same 
user. I guess the difference is that the X session login has its own 
root window where as the SSH one uses the root window of the SSH client.

In the SSH session, "xprop -root | grep PULSE" returns a value for 
PULSE_SERVER:
PULSE_SERVER(STRING) = "{jl-vaio}unix:/tmp/pulse-john/native 
tcp:jl-vaio.lan:4713 tcp6:jl-vaio.lan:4713"

In the X session (the one that audio works from), xprop returns nothing 
at all:

john at vzopenbox_dev:~$ xprop -root | grep PULSE
john at vzopenbox_dev:~$

I HAVE IT WORKING NOW!!!! I tracked the problem down to the fact that 
the xprop "PULSE_SERVER" references the server by host name (jl-vaio and 
jl-vaio.lan in the above output). These host names were unknown to the 
client - I fixed it by putting them into /etc/hosts.

Without the PULSE_SERVER info, I presume apps like audacious (or vlc 
which I've also tried) successfully find a pulseaudio server on the 
network (and this does not depend on host names) ? Can I make the SSH 
one do it the same way ? By this I think I mean how can I make it ignore 
the values returned by xprop ? I would rather not have to rely on host 
names.

Incidentally, I don't have /etc/xdg/autostart at all and I don't have a 
pulseaudio daemon on the machine that I'm running Audacious on but this 
does not stop it working in the X session. It is definitely playing via 
the Pulseaudio server as I can see the session on the manager.