[pulseaudio-discuss] multiseat audio

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 15.04.09 18:14, Brad Midgley (bmidgley at gmail.com) wrote:

> Hey
> 
> The info I can find about multiseat sound with pulseaudio is several
> months old. Lennart was saying you can't use a daemon in system mode
> and to avoid HAL but the examples use system mode.

Examples? Which examples?

> What is the best way to do this currently? I want to use built-in and
> usb-connected sound for two seats for starters. I'd prefer if I don't
> have to hardcode users to a specific seat.

This all is very much in flux. I have never toyedd around with
multiseat myself so I cannot tell you how it could work right
now. 

There are some plans to make Fedora more compatible with multiseat setups:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Multiseat

I guess the basic idea is to have some kind of multiseat support in
ConsoleKit so that everyone can query it to figure out which hw
belongs to which seat. But nobody worked on that yet. And hence PA
doesn't care either about that info.

There needs to be some kind of daemon that honours the seat
definitions and sets up device ACLs accordingly. The daemon that was
supposed to do this was HAL. Now HAL is dead and udev-acl from the
udev-extras is supposed to take over. But that tool is mostly a proof
of concept right now.

In summary: everything that is available right now in this area is
hackish, incomplete. And AFAIK nobody is actually and actively working
on changing the situation.

Things seldomly get fixed by themselves. Somebody needs to get
his hands dirty.

Lennart

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