[pulseaudio-discuss] Hpw to start the pa server

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Gene Heskett at 12/04/10 07:34 did gyre and gimble:
> How do I go about starting or restarting PA from a root shell?  None of the 
> other paman or pactl utilities can connect to the server so everything is 
> greyed out ATM.

This is quite a specific question, but I want to ask a more basic
question in return. Why do you want to run pulse from a root shell? Is
there a specific reason to do this.

Normally PA is started at X11 login by a normal user (see
start-pulseaudio-x11) but also via autospawning whenever it's needed
(see client.conf)

The normal situation of running a sound producing application as root is
to piggy back on to the X11 root window in order to get connection
credentials. The root user would then connect to the users PA daemon and
not create his own one.

The reason for this revolves around which user is "active". When you
become root via e.g. su or sudo, the root session is not considered
"active" and thus consolekit will not hand over device control
gracefully. If your sound h/w supports it, it would be possible to run
two PAs at the same time, but like I say, it's generally easier to just
piggy back on to the users PA via it's root window.

See here for an explanation of how piggy backing on ot the X11 root
window actually works.

http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/08/sound-on-linux-is-confusing-defuzzing-part-2-pulseaudio/

HTHs

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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