[pulseaudio-discuss] get Pulseaudio to work on headless Linux server w/o root access?

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Tue, 2018-04-03 at 09:59 -0700, Ben Sferrazza wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am forced to use an older Linux distribution at my electrical engineering
> firm due to some legacy EDA software. These headless Linux rack servers use
> kernel 2.6.18, and I do not have root access. Fortunately I've been able to
> build a completely bootstrapped toolchain and environment with the latest
> glibc (2.19) supported by the kernel, and the very latest binutils, gcc,
> and dozens and dozens of libraries and binaries, even having built an Xorg
> server and Xfce4 desktop environment. All works well.
> 
> But I'd like to get support for sound on these headless servers that lack
> physical sound cards. I don't believe snd-dummy has been built into the
> kernel, and without root access I'm curious if I have any chance of getting
> Pulseaudio to work and what steps I'd need to take to get it to run
> properly. I've built dbus and Pulseaudio into my environment, but am at
> loss on how to get it to work given the limitations I've mentioned. Thanks
> for any suggestions!

What kind of sound support are you looking for? You mentioned snd-
dummy, which makes it sound like you only need to have some kind of
audio device available, it doesn't actually need to make any noise.

Have you tried running PulseAudio yet? If there are no hardware devices
available, a null sink will be automatically created, which
applications can play to.

-- 
Tanu

https://liberapay.com/tanuk
https://www.patreon.com/tanuk