[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 27.11.09 17:30, Henning Oschwald (h.oschwald at gmx.de) wrote:

> > previously you have to ask yourself some very serious questions when
> > you are using a root process to interact with sound anyway? Why should
> > any root process be doing that? Root is evil and should be avoided
> > except when absolutely necessary.
> 
> Well, but nevertheless an X session is required to allow differend user
> accounts to access the audio subsystem at the same time. This is a
> drawback for me as I'm used to do a lot of my daily work on a text
> console outside of a X session, so I need to run X just to share audio
> access between different user accounts.

This is a bit confused.

PA does indeed *not* allow multiple users simultaneous access to the
same audio device. This is because we consider the sound card to be
part of the user seat, the same way as the keyboard, the mouse, or the
screen. If we'd allow multiple users access then they might eavesdrop
into your voip calls or even record anything you say from the mic. As
long as a user is active on a seat he should be the only one who has
access to its devices.

Now, what you are saying about the relation of X and console sessions
is not true. On current distros it should not make much of a
difference if you log into X or into the console. Only one instance of
PA will be started and shared among all your sessions on your seat, be
them X or the console. 

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4