[pulseaudio-discuss] Help needed for system-wide pulseaudio for blind users

[Tanu Kaskinen]

ma, 2010-01-04 kello 11:02 -0500, Bill Cox kirjoitti:
> I'm trying to build a Vinux (blind-user Linux distro) release based on
> Ubuntu/Lucid.  There's too much code to rewrite to have everything
> working the "right" way with pulseaudio by May, so I want to release
> Vinux/Ubuntu Lucid with the system-wide hack.
> 
> I've enabled PA to start in system wide mode by editing
> /etc/defaults/pulseaudio, and enabling it there.  I've added gdm,
> root, speech-dispatcher, and my user name to the pulse-access group.
> Pulseaudio starts, and speech-dispatcher and speechd-up work with it
> just fine at boot.  Since this is a distro for the blind, I boot into
> a console, not gdm.  The login prompt is read nicely, as is text when
> I log in.  However, if I try to play a .wav file, there is no sound.
> None of the apps with PA back-ends will play sound for me.  When I
> type 'startx', Gome comes up, but the sound preference dialog tells me
> there's no sound card.  I suspect that rights to use it have been
> granted to the speech-dispatcher user, and I'm not able to access it.

If speech-dispatcher keeps on working after login, I would guess that
speech-dispatcher couldn't connect to pulseaudio and fell back to some
other sound system. If speech-dispatcher were actually using the
system-wide pulseaudio instance, I can't see any reason why other users
couldn't use it too - being in the pulse-access group should be enough
to get access.

Output of "ps aux | grep pulse", "pactl list" and "lsof /dev/snd/*"
after logging in in the console should verify if this indeed is the
situation.

If pulseaudio has failed to start at boot, syslog probably has some
errors from pulseaudio.

I wonder if the audio device permission rewriting should be disabled
somehow before the system-wide daemon works properly. The current
symptoms don't sound like you've hit this issue yet, but I would think
that the system-wide pulseaudio instance will lose access to the sound
card as soon as someone logs in.

-- 
Tanu Kaskinen