[pulseaudio-discuss] Using pulseaudio with speakup

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Bill Cox at 01/01/10 21:58 did gyre and gimble:
> However, even with these changes, there are bugs due to pulseaudio's
> user-based structure.  Today, in Karmic, if I 'switch user' to another
> use, my new gnome session has no sound.  That's because there are two
> pulseaudio processes running, and the first one takes over control of
> the sound card and does not share.

Other folk have replied now but just to explain in detail for clarity:

It is by design that multiple pulseaudio processes run at the same time
but the idea is that they gracefully drop access to the actual sound
hardware when the given user is not supposed to have access. This is why
the gdm user has direct access at the login window and then when a user
logs in it gracefully hands control over to the real user. Again
switching users should all just work.

PA should remain running even when the user does not have current access
to the hardware as it will "cork" it's streams (a sort of equivalent to
pause) and as more applications are aware of the concept of corking they
will be able to adjust their UI accordingly. We can also issue corks for
other reasons (e.g. a voip call comes in so the music and video apps are
corked/paused.

So whatever problem you are having switching users would seem to suggest
a problem with consolekit and/or the consolekit module in PA.

Use the program ck-list-sessions to see which user is currently "active"
to debug this further.

Daniel's earlier comments about the different users are the wait forward
to debug further.

Col

-- 

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

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