[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Bill Cox]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> Yes, the speakup daemons need to be modified so that they can be run
> as a normal user instead of root, and then can deal with devices (both
> audio and those special speakup kernnel devices) being assigned and
> taken away from them. We'd then run one of those daemons in each
> session and have one pseudo-session that owns the console as long as
> nobody is logged in on it. That way speakup would become very similar
> to orca and live in a nicely contained environment that closely mimics
> the gdm user pseudo-session that gdm maintains.
>
> In a simple list:
>
> 1) fix the speakup daemons so that they dont need root and can deal
> with devices being assigned to them and going away.
>
> 2) write some udev rules that make the speakup special devices ACL
> managed the same way as audio devices already are. (i.e. just set
> ACL_MANAGE=1 for them, it's a one-liner)
>
> 3) write a little wrapper for the speakup daemons that sets up a
> pseudo-session in ck that owns the console and then runs the speakup
> daemon in it.
>
> done.

Thanks for the summary.  I may not get to this until summer, but I'm
on the case.  This is very helpful.

> The whole point of ConsoleKit is to follow who's logged in. Are you
> suggesting that if you login on the console ck-list-sessions does not
> list that session? If that's the case your really should have a word
> with the Ubuntu developers...

I was wrong.  What's going on is that PA does not launch automatically
when I login, and that had me confused.  Sessions do seem to be
tracked, and it does seem to know which is active.

Bill