[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 01.01.10 23:13, Bill Cox (waywardgeek at gmail.com) wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
>  'Twas brillig, and Halim Sahin at 23/12/09 13:24 did gyre and gimble:
> >> The Problem can be summarized in one sentence:
> >> Pulseaudio currently breaks multiuser systems and is only useful for
> >> one-user-desktop.
> >
> > Actually no, the exact opposite. PA works very well for multi user
> > desktops.
> 
> Hi, Col.  Let me say I'm beginning to be a fan of your posts, as I
> read more of them.  This is probably an Ubuntu issue, but in Karmic
> and Lucid, Switch User does not change the permissions for the sound
> card, and the new user will be mute.  It's a fairly minor bug... the
> work-around is logout and log back in.
> 
> IMO, Halim's more important comment was that PulseAudio breaks
> accessibility.  Speakup is either the #1 or #2 most popular Linux
> accessibility program for the blind and visually impaired.  It starts
> at boot, as it should, so a blind person can hear what's going on.
> 
> Gdm kills PulseAudio when a user logs in.  Speakup runs forever, and
> it' PulseAudio process hangs around forever, locking up the sound
> card, so the user can't get any sound in Gnome.

I dont see why the speech tools should be handled in any way different
from the other acessibility tools we ship: in that they are part of
the session. While I am no accessibility expert I am kinda sure that
on Fedora all accessibility stuff is run inside the user session and
the gdm pseudo-session so that the fully a11y features are available
both before and after the login. 

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4