[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 01.01.10 23:50, Bill Cox (waywardgeek at gmail.com) wrote:

> > On Fedora at least the screenreader runs as normal process in the gdm
> > pseudo-session which also happens to run a PA instance. So everything
> > should be fine here, and I am quite sure this is not only done on
> > Fedora this way but all other distributions that use a current version
> > of gdm.
> 
> Lennart, let me explain how blind people use Linux.  There are TWO
> applications in common use - Orca and Speakup.  Actually, there's a
> third - emacspeak, but let's not go there, yet.  Orca is the screen
> reader that you are talking about.  It runs as user, and can be made
> to work well with PulseAudio.  I've personally helped in that effort
> (I wrote a new pulseaudio driver for it).  The other critical
> application is Speakup.  It runs as a kernel module and speaks every
> bit of console output during the boot process.  Many blind people rely
> heavily on Speakup, and only use Orca for websites that require
> Firefox to read.

Hmmm, speakup is not supported in fedora anymore, afaik. The kernel
patch never got merged upstream, did it? And there are no plans for
that either, are there? It doesn't really particularly increase my
interest in supporting something like this if there is no push to get
this merged upstream into kernels and the major distributions.

In Fedora our plans are mostly to get rid of the console entirely in
the long run anyway, its not shown anymore by default already.

But anyway, if we want to support this, how was the traditional
handing over of the audio device done between speakup and the orca tts
stuff done? Why isnt the speakup tts daemon run inside a
pseudo-session similar to how gdm handles this when running orca
inside of a pseudo-session? To me it sounds that if we want to do the
handover properly anyway the cleanest way would be for speakup to
simply call into ckit to register a pseudo-session. Then during bootup
we would first run that speakup tts daemon in a speakup ck
session. Then, when gdm starts up we'd run orca in the gdm session,
and finally run orca in the user sessio, and hence have two handovers
in the whole process: from speakup to gdm and from gdm to proper
gnome.

> speaking all console output to the user.  The blind don't give a hoot
> how we get speach from /dev/speakup_soft to the sound card.  It just
> has to happen.  Today, on every pulseaudio enabled system I know of,
> this does not work properly.  I tried setting speakup to use alsa, and
> it works, right up until pulseaudio for gdm starts.  After that,
> speakup is mute.  Is there any way for pulseaudio to share the sound
> card with speakup/alsa?

Why do you need speakup anymore after gdm is started up?

Lennart

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