[pulseaudio-discuss] Multi user access to PulseAudio

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sun, 2016-09-11 at 12:19 +0200, Ralph Benzinger wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm trying to configure PulseAudio on a fresh Kubuntu 16.04 install.
> 
> When I'm logged into the desktop, I run a few other programs such
> as browsers as different users.  By default, those programs are not
> allowed to access PulseAudio.
> 
> How can I change that and enable multi user access to PulseAudio?
> 
> Desprite Googling for days, I can't get this to work.  Suggestions I
> found that DON'T work include:
> 
> - running in system mode (but that is bad, so I won't)
> - passing auth-cookie-enabled=0 to module-native-protocol-unix in
>   /etc/pulse/default.pa (no effect)
> - enabling network access (that seems a little overkill, and also
>   didn't work for me).
> 
> So please, what is the official way of granting users other than the
> logged-in user access to PulseAudio?

I'd just use the system mode. There's not much of a difference between
a system daemon and a daemon that isn't technically running in the
system mode but accepts connections from multiple users.

If you really want to avoid the system mode, you need to make sure
module-native-protocol-unix creates the socket in a place where other
users can access it (/var/run/user/1000/pulse/ is not accessible by
other users by default), configure the authentication so that other
users can get in and configure the environment of the other users so
that they know where the socket is (by default XGD_RUNTIME_DIR is used
to find /var/run/user/<uid/, but you can also configure "default-
server" in client.conf or set the PULSE_SERVER environment variable to
point to an arbitrary socket location).

-- 
Tanu