[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[David Henningsson]

Bill Cox wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Lennart Poettering
> <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
>> We actually cover that inside of gdm, where you can get access to the
>> boot messages.
>>
>> Lennart
> 
> Speakup doesn't stop reading when the user logs into Gnome.  When we
> type Ctrl+Alt+F1, we get a console screen which is read by speakup.
> It reads the login prompt, and then all the console text after login,
> whether as a normal user, or as root.  It runs in parallel with Gnome,
> and never exits until shutdown.  Most blind Linux users I know love
> this behaviour, and will not consider Linux distros that don't support
> it.  

I was just thinking, and this idea is perhaps not 100% thought through,
but it could be worth considering.

We have this hand-over mechanism:

http://git.0pointer.de/?p=reserve.git;a=blob_plain;f=reserve.txt

It looks nice, except for that it lives on the session D-bus. Now assume
we move (or copy) it to the system D-bus instead. Then we implement the
handover request in speakup, timidity, and other programs not running
inside the session context.

This seems like a working middle-way between using the user's PulseAudio
(which seems difficult, especially when it changes) and the path of
uninstalling PulseAudio completely.

I'm not a qualified plumber, so I could possibly be missing something
obvious here. What do you think?

// David