[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Markus Rechberger]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> 'Twas brillig, and Markus Rechberger at 22/12/09 16:54 did gyre and gimble:
>> A couple of years ago I used to log in on a remote PC and export XMMS
>> to another PC for playing back audio, I can imagine that this is also
>> not possible anymore with PA
>
> The problem is you are expecting one thing whereas most people expect
> something else.
>
> If I login to a remote PC and export XMMS to another PC, I *expect* my
> audio to be played at the same location as the display is seen. This
> works perfectly with PA if you enable the TCP options in paprefs.
>
> 1. ssh machineb
> 2. (internally ssh will forward X11 via a tunnel and set $DISPLAY
> environment variable in your session on machineb - ssh is aware of X)
> 3. xmms
> 4. (as an x app, xmms will look at $DISPLAY, which will ultimately be
> tunneled over ssh to your local machine).
> 5. xmms -> play
> 6. PA client kicks in, looks for properties in the X root window (which
> belong to our initial machine), finds details of how to connect to our
> local machine (as we can't use an SSH tunnel as ssh is not aware of PA
> yet in the same way it is with X), connects and plays sound.
>
> This way I can sit at my laptop, ssh to my server in the next room, run
> a visual app that plays audio and both see and hear the app on my local
> machine. This is how most people expect remote applications to work.
>

well I moreover mean that the soundsystem is not connected to my notebook
but to the server.
I pointed out to 2 use cases which don't work with PA now but with
alsa and OSS, it won't
help if you write that those are just my use cases it probably might
turn out that everyone else's use case
is not your use case either and drop such reports when they come up.

I don't get why the entire permission thing should not work with other
users even with SYSV IPC
you should have the normal user/group permission levels.

Markus