Using pulseaudio by default

[Matthias Clasen]

Since one of the plans for better sound in FC7 involves replacing
esound by pulseaudio, I had a look at this problem today. 

First there is a wiki page about transitioning the gnome stack to
pulseaudio (http://live.gnome.org/PulseAudio?highlight=%28pulse%29)
which as some white spots, so there is some work left to do - it may be
possible to get there quickly for now by making use of the fact that
pulseaudio has esd emulation, and worry about cleaning up libesd
dependencies later. Is that the plan for FC7 ? What is the plan for
gstreamer, use the pulseaudio alsa emulation ?

Then, I installed the current Extras pulseaudio package, and found that
it does not work :-(.

Trying to run pulseaudio yields:

main.c: WARNING: called SUID root, but not in group 'pulse-rt'.
module-hal-detect.c: failed to detect any sound hardware. 
module.c: Failed to load "module-hal-detect" (argument: ""):
initialization failed.
main.c: Module load failed.
main.c: failed to initialize daemon.


Judging by the error message, pulseaudio seems to use some debianesque
manage-by-groups scheme. Indeed, looking at /etc/group, the package
created three groups, "pulse", "pulse-rt" and "pulse-access". But
why are these created in the range of regular user-groups, and how does
one use them ? I couldn't find any documentation about this in the
package.

Clearly, some work is needed to make pulseaudio-based sound work
out of the box.


Matthias