On Do, Nov 26 2009, Colin Guthrie wrote: > 'Twas brillig, and Markus Rechberger at 26/11/09 14:50 did gyre and gimble: >> I don't know how the permission stuff is handled, but root should be >> an exception for this and >> be allowed by default. > > The exception to the rule is not necessarily the problem (the concept > itself is valid enough), but to think about this problem generally you > need to understand how audio works and, more importantly, what are the > underlying limitations. [...] > previously you have to ask yourself some very serious questions when > you are using a root process to interact with sound anyway? Why should > any root process be doing that? Root is evil and should be avoided > except when absolutely necessary. Well, but nevertheless an X session is required to allow differend user accounts to access the audio subsystem at the same time. This is a drawback for me as I'm used to do a lot of my daily work on a text console outside of a X session, so I need to run X just to share audio access between different user accounts. Furthermore, I'm a screenreader user, so I need Speech-Dispatcher running permanently under its own uid, which is started on boot. Sure I could run it under my main uid, but this would be kind of a workaround IMO. I really like Pulseaudio's features and use it on my Computer at home and on the laptop, but it is a lot less conviniend to use without a running X session than ALSA, which in particular makes sense on laptops and netbooks. Running PA as a system daemon would solve this problem, but I understand that this isn't advisable at all. It would be really cool if we could share PA between users without a running X session. Just my 2 cents. Henning
