> Is it possible to run PulseAudio without X11 (but not in system mode)?
> I want to run Pulse on a headless server to do network sound, and
> while system mode works, it's not supported (e.g. pacmd doesn't work).
There are two approaches:
1)The simplest is to run:
dbus-launch screen
This uses screen as your CLI session manager with unlimited (pretty much)
terminals, all of them under one dbus instance. Then run:
pulseaudio --start
in any of the terminals screen has open. pacmd will then work on the same
or another screen terminal. I was able to start pulseaudio in one
terminal, jack_control start in a second, pacmd and set the default
sink to jack in another and finally run paplay to send audio from a
wave file, though pulseaudio to jack and out the device. No I am not
saying you should use jackdbus as well, paplay to pulse to speakers
worked fine too.
2)If you don't want to use screen for some reason (??!!??), I ran a script
from /etc/rc.local as my audio user, that started dbus and saved the
two environment variables to a file in the home directory. Then in
~/.profile I put (added):
------------------8<------------------
if [ -f "$HOME/.bin/setsession" ]; then
. "$HOME/.bin/setsession"
fi
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID
------------------8<------------------
Then any VT or ssh login would use the same instance of dbus.
I did this before I had discovered screen. And it did work just fine,
however there is not much difference from ctl-a 0-9 and altF1 - altF9 and
screen will let you start it from one remote computer and then continue on
another with all the same set of terminals.
--
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net
