[pulseaudio-discuss] Hpw to start the pa server

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 12 April 2010, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>'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.

Trouble shooting.  In about 90 days of screwing with this, the best I have 
been able to come up with is a 100% wide open volume of one channel only in 
my emu10k1, Audigy2 Value, SB0400 based card.  Wide open enough that if I had 
more than 20 watts, I'd total the speakers.  As it is I might wake the 
neighbors. When that was working, kmix had no control over the volume.

I have now blacklisted all the other audio facilities that an lspci can find 
on this machine except the emu10k1 stuff.  But its been totally silent except 
for the thump in the speakers when udev starts for a month or more.  I 
finally found a 64 bit libflashplayer.so and the video on the news sites 
looks great, now I would like to understand why I have no sound.
 
>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/

I have looked at this site before Colin, and with all due respect, it makes a 
lot of assumptions and totally ignores the case where there may be alternate, 
obviously competing for resources, audio facilities on a machine.  Because it 
assumes everybody has only one audio, it is less than helpful for those cases 
where you are trying to get PA to use the correct facility.

For starters:
[gene at coyote src]$ xprop -root | grep PULSE
[gene at coyote src]$

And, following that page, /etc/pulse/client.conf's only active line is 
"autospawn = no"

I will change that to yes and log out/in.

/etc/pulse/daemon.conf also has only one active line:
default-sample-channels = 2


>HTHs
>
I am _not_ running X as root, this is mandriva 2010-x64.  I have ripped out, 
then reinstalled the pulse stuff a couple of times using mandriva control 
center.  I hear a thump in the speakers when udev starts, but that is the 
only sound.  Running any of the PA related stuff in the kmenu's gets me 
nothing but a "connection refused" for an error message.  As does running 
them from a root shell.  And this is after a fresh reboot and restart of X.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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