[pulseaudio-discuss] only "dummy audio" available when many users want to use one audio card

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Tomasz Chmielewski at 22/11/09 01:22 did gyre and gimble:
> Colin Guthrie wrote:
> 
>> To achieve what you want you need to stop running a separate PA for 
>> each user and instead one system-wide version (see the --system) 
>> argument.
>>
>> You then need to add each user to the pulse-access group to ensure 
>> they are allowed to talk to the PA process.
> 
> What is pulse-access group?
> 
> I don't have any group containing "pulse" in /etc/groups.
> 
> Also, grepping for "group" in /etc/pulseaudio/ doesn't find anything.

This is a compile time setting. You can change the group if you like, 
but see the output from ./configure.

A standard "make install" will not create the group - it's up to distros 
to create the group on package installation. Many distros don't really 
support system wide mode out of the box tho seeing as 99.9% of users 
don't really want/need to use it (the common case being two users 
switching between desktops (e.g. both logged in but not physically using 
the machine at the same time). For this reason you may have to create 
the pulse-access group yourself.

There should be some info kicking around about system mode PA if you 
google around for it.

>> This isn't really recommended as the users will be able to see each 
>> others streams which is a privacy issue, but it may not matter too much.
> 
> Yep, not an issue here.
> 
> 


-- 

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

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