[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Halim Sahin at 23/12/09 13:24 did gyre and gimble:
> The Problem can be summarized in one sentence:
> Pulseaudio currently breaks multiuser systems and is only useful for
> one-user-desktop.

Actually no, the exact opposite. PA works very well for multi user
desktops. The vast majority of systems out there have one screen, one
keyboard and one mouse. If you have multiple users and want to switch
between them PA facilitates this perfectly (in a way that simply does
not work with current ALSA and it's implementations.

Simply switch user (using your DEs tools for this - typically by
clicking Log Out and selecting "Switch User" or similar. This starts a
new X server and allows another user to login in. This second user will
now get access to the sound device while the previous user is locked out
(but in a nice way) from producing sound). When you switch back and
forth between your users (typically ctrl+alt+F7 or F8) the permissions
to use the sound device follow which user is active and sound will start
and stop appropriately. This is exactly how it should be and PA
facilitates this.

What you are complaining about is the fact that multiple users cannot
use the sound hardware *at the same time* but this is really not how
things should work for all the reasons listed on this thread already.
It's not how it's done in Windows and it's not how it's done on OSX. We
have parity with the current OSX and Windows implementations with PA in
this regard.

> Running more pulse servers at a time can work but is difficult for
> setup.

No it's not. It's the standard out of the box setup. Each user who logs
in will get their own PA server automatically via XDG autostart .desktop
files or PA autospawning.

Col
-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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