'Twas brillig, and Gene Heskett at 12/04/10 07:34 did gyre and gimble: > How do I go about starting or restarting PA from a root shell? None of the > other paman or pactl utilities can connect to the server so everything is > greyed out ATM. This is quite a specific question, but I want to ask a more basic question in return. Why do you want to run pulse from a root shell? Is there a specific reason to do this. Normally PA is started at X11 login by a normal user (see start-pulseaudio-x11) but also via autospawning whenever it's needed (see client.conf) The normal situation of running a sound producing application as root is to piggy back on to the X11 root window in order to get connection credentials. The root user would then connect to the users PA daemon and not create his own one. The reason for this revolves around which user is "active". When you become root via e.g. su or sudo, the root session is not considered "active" and thus consolekit will not hand over device control gracefully. If your sound h/w supports it, it would be possible to run two PAs at the same time, but like I say, it's generally easier to just piggy back on to the users PA via it's root window. See here for an explanation of how piggy backing on ot the X11 root window actually works. http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/08/sound-on-linux-is-confusing-defuzzing-part-2-pulseaudio/ HTHs -- 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/]