Hi Shlomi,
It would have probably been wise to ask this on the cooker mailing list
first but seeing as you're here now ;)
Shlomi Fish wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> I'm using Mandriva Cooker (the bleeding edge of Mandriva Linux) with
> Pulseaudio. However, other users I su - to cannot play sound despite
> the fact that they belong to the "audio" group. Pulseaudio is started
> like this:
> # Do some pid file tidy up
> PIDFILE=/tmp/pulse-$USER/pid
> if [ -f $PIDFILE ]; then
> PID=$(cat $PIDFILE)
> if [ -f /proc/$PID/status ]; then
> PNAME=$(cat /proc/$PID/status | grep ^Name | awk '{ print $2 }')
> if [ "pulseaudio" != "$PNAME" ]; then
> # This is a bogus pid file and pulse will fail to start.
> rm -f $PIDFILE
> fi
> fi
> fi
This whole bit can technically be removed now but I forgot to tidy up
after myself post 0.9.8 when better PID tidyup was added to pulse itself.
> And:
>
> <<<<<<<<<<
> shlomi:~$ ls -l /tmp/pulse-shlomi/
> total 4
> srwxrwxrwx 1 shlomi shlomi 0 2008-03-22 19:40 native
> -rw------- 1 shlomi shlomi 5 2008-03-22 19:40 pid
>
> Any suggestions and best-practices will be welcome.
To explain:
The pulse libraries (which get invoked when playing sound) will check
the current user and see if they can access /tmp/pulse-$USER for a
control socket with which to communicate with the pulse daemon. When you
su or su - the $USER is root and therefore it doesn't look at your
/tmp/pulse-shlomi (initially).
It then falls back to other methods, e.g. network. In theory it should
follow your X11 cookie, but I'm not 100% sure that's working right now -
I'll need to look.
Certainly how my machine appears to be able to play sounds as root at
the moment is because I have the network enabled in paprefs and I have
"Don't require authentication" ticked" If I turn this off, root cannot play.
Hope this helps.
Col
