[pulseaudio-discuss] Change sound via acpid

[John W]

On 12/30/15, Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> wrote:
>
> If you only need to care about root getting access to your main user
> (that is, you're the only human user of the laptop), I think the
> easiest solution would be to use "sudo --user=john --set-home pactl
> set-sink-mute SINK toggle". Replace SINK with the alsa sink name, you
> can find the name with "pactl list sinks".

Thanks for the 'pactl ...' suggestion; that did work (with proper user
supplied, etc).

For the benefit of others, note that I did have to go through a little
slice of SELinux hell to get it to work from the acpid script. You
can't just run "pactl" commands from the acpid security context
out-of-the-box, it would seem.

I filed a bug for that issue, but who knows when or if that might be
addressed: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1298432


This solution still does have the downside of needing to know what
user to target. I am determining that by looking at who ran the
'pulseaudio -D' command, but that's a bit lame. Maybe the more
"proper" solution would be to run in system mode, but that still
leaves me a little uneasy.