pulseaudio, howto make it work?

[Russell Miller]

Les Mikesell wrote:
>
> 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.
>
I think it's a very cogent point.  At the same time, the usual use case 
for someone who would actually *use* audio is that they would be logged 
into the console and would be doing stuff that requires sound, and no 
one else would.

It's actually a false assumption - a very false assumption, and one that 
actually gets in the way more than not.  And I can actually give you one 
use case from personal experience.

I had a girlfriend, say, 7 or 8 years ago (maybe earlier) who had a 
Linux system (yeah, yeah, why'd I let her get away and all that, save it 
for another time), along with a collection of mp3 files.  She gave me 
the IP address, and sometimes I would log in to her machine and play a 
random mp3 file, which she liked.  The way pulseaudio is set up now, 
that would not be possible without manually messing with the configuration.

Perhaps this is another case of making things easier for the vast 
majority of users while making things phenomenally more difficult for 
the edge cases.  Shrug.  Guess it's a design philosophy.

--Russell