[pulseaudio-discuss] Change sound via acpid

[John W]

Hello,

I'm trying to make the mute/unmute key on my laptop work.
It generates acpi events, but does not generate XF86AudioMute X11
message - In fact, I prefer it to be that way, since I don't want to
rely upon X11 running in order to do this.

I'm trying to figure out the "right" way to do this.
N.B.: It is my understanding that running in system mode, while it may
work, is not the "right" way to do this. I am looking for an
alternative to that, if possible.

My acpi script runs (as root), and I want it to toggle the mute state.

I tried "amixer set Master toggle", but that doesn't work as root.
I can reproduce it with "sudo" - see below:

    $ sudo amixer set Master toggle
    ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to
connect: Connection refused

    amixer: Mixer attach default error: Connection refused

>From reading around, I came to learn that this can be caused by a
missing "cookie" file.
However, even copying the /home/myuser/.config/pulse/cookie file to
/root/.config/pulse/cookie did not solve this issue.

Question 0: Is there any way to get logging information about these
denials, from pulseaudio? The usual advice is to run pulseaudio as a
non-daemon, with "-vvvv" option. I can do this, but even so, none of
these "Connection refused" incidents appear.
Is there somewhere else I should look?

Question 1:
What other reason could there be for this "Connection refused" from
pulse? Any ideas?
Is there any good way for me to confirm that my copied cookie file is
correct, to try to narrow down the problem?

So, I abandoned that approach. Even in the best case, this would
require re-copying the cookie every time I rebooted, or having my
script figure out who spawned pulseaudio, then look in their user
directory, etc. Seems hacky to me.

I learned about "system mode", but given that the developers
themselves say it is unsupported and bad, I am not touching that. Nor
do I trust all that pulseaudio code running as root (:

Next, I found out about the unix socket authentication options in
/etc/pulse/default.pa
I created /etc/pulse/client.conf, and added:

    default-server = unix:/tmp/pulse-access-socket

And made a corresponding change in /etc/pulse/default.pa:

    load-module module-native-protocol-unix auth-anonymous=1
socket=/tmp/pulse-access-socket

But this does not seem to work.
Looking at the manpages, there are some hints that maybe these options
only apply in system mode? I am not sure...

Question 2:
Can anyone confirm or deny that that method is legitimate?

And really, any other suggestions of how to get this to work are welcome.

Thanks
-John