[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Bill Cox]

I spent a few hours trying to figure out how well this scheme could
work for Ubuntu/Lucid.  Things are in bad shape.  Speakup basically is
incompatible with PA on Lucid for now.  The problems seem to come from
multiple PA instances not sharing properly.  If you switch-user to a
new user on Karmic or Lucid, the new user has no access to the sound
card.  With the gdm PA instance running inorder to speak console login
prompts, and the user PA running in Gnome, I can't get both to work at
the same time.

Since I'm not aware of any time that this has ever worked properly on
Ubuntu with PA, I suspect it may be years before these issues are
fixed.