'Twas brillig, and John Lane at 09/04/09 23:52 did gyre and gimble: > what is different about the ssh session that prevents this from working ? > > any help much appreciated. I'll explain briefly how it works and that may help you debug your env further. I'll assume you're using a recent version of PA. When pulse is started inside an X11 environment, an XDG autostart file should be run. /etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop This runs the script start-pulseaudio-x11. This loads a module in the pulsedaemon (and starts it if it's not running yet) which allows the configuration to queried via x window properties. If you do xprop -root | grep PULSE you'll see the values I'm referring to, but the important one is PULSE_SERVER. When you ssh -X it will allow the remote machine to query the pulseaudio settings from the root window so doing xprop -root | grep PULSE after ssh'ing should give you the same result. Using this variable it should be possible to connect back to your pulseaudio daemon, but it could be getting overridden somewhere else. e.g. you may have a client.conf (either in /etc/pulse or ~/.pulse) that overrides the server= argument for example. If you can play about a bit, and set the standard environment variable PULSE_SERVER I'm sure you can trace where the problem lies. Hope this helps. Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]