pulseaudio, howto make it work?

[Les Mikesell]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> 
>>>>
>>>> pulseaudio doesn't set the user permissions on devices but is handled by
>>>> ConsoleKit / HAL
>>>>
>>>> If you give a report on your audio hardware submitted to ConsoleKit
>>>> package, they could fix the problem (assuming that someone else hasn't
>>>> already reported it).
>>> 'Scuse me, Craig, but WTH does console-kit have to do with pulseaudio?  In
>>> all the considerable ranting and raving that has gone on since F8 came out
>>> with this supposed "improvement", I don't recall console-kit ever being
>>> mentioned in the same context as pulseaudio.
>>>
>>> Please explain.
>> The explanation is there.....
>>
> Where?

You must have missed a lot - this was discussed to death when people 
first had problems with pulseaudio.  Consolekit assumes that the 
speakers are owned exclusively by whoever happens to be logged into the 
console at the moment.  Personally I think this is as bad as if the tape 
device were handled that way and your system backups would crash if the 
wrong user happens to log in at the wrong time.  I almost never log in 
directly at the console and what my speakers are playing shouldn't 
depend on that.

I believe pulseaudio has a framework that can act as a suitable sound 
server for a multiuser system or even network-stream access across 
multiple systems, but the fedora configuration emulates a toy 
single-user box instead.  The bug isn't so much with either pulseaudio 
or consolekit specifically but with the choice to run pulseaudio in a 
session rather than as a service. It just doesn't work for scenarios 
where you don't dedicate the whole box to being someone's personal device.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com