Multiuser pulseaudio issues

tmske · 2010-10-15 19:39:26

I've been having some troubles getting pulseaudio to work in a multiuser environment. Well, it only works for on user at a time. This is the situation.
On my laptop, as long as only one user is logged in, pulseaudio plays audio fine, as soon as a second user logs in (while user 1 is still logged in) pulseaudio stops working for user 1, it works for user 2 though.

Does anyone know how I can solve this problem and make it work for both users? I've googled a bit but can't find many useful/hopeful things...

ngoonee · 2010-10-16 02:43:11

This is by design in pulseaudio (they hook on to the user-switching mechanism in the DE, presumably Gnome in your case). What are you intending to achieve?

tmske · 2010-10-16 08:52:58

I want to give the active user access to the sound. Now this doesn't work.

One of the users uses kde, the other one xmonad. When I boot my laptop I start kde (sound works fine), then I create a new session in (the xmonad session). The sound in xmonad works fine then too. After that I switch sessions with ctrl+alt+[f7-f8]. When I'm back in kde, there is no sound there, the xmonad user always keeps the sound. How can I change this behaviour so that when I switch sessions, the sound goes to the active user?

ngoonee · 2010-10-16 11:00:27

xmonad should use consolekit properly, then everything will work (presumedly). I don't use xmonad myself, but perhaps you could launch it with 'ck-launch' or something (this is just educated guessing).

tmske · 2010-10-16 12:19:35

Ok, I don't know much about consolekit, but the output of ck-list-sessions looks correct. Two sessions, with active= "TRUE" on the active session and active = "FALSE" on the other one, this switches fine when I switch with ctrl+alt+[f7-f8].

ngoonee · 2010-10-17 14:42:40

Well, I'm no expert on ck-related stuff. Would suggest you bring this up to the PA mailing list, Lennart isn't there much nowadays, some other project he has but Colin is very good at giving quick and to-the-point answers. It does look based on your info that there's a pulseaudio bug.

Before you do that though, perhaps try with pulseaudio-git from AUR? Due to Lennart's other responsibilities pulseaudio actually has not been released in months, and the queue of fixes in git is quite long.

R00KIE · 2010-10-17 19:16:46

That's a little odd, as far as I know when not running pulse system wide (which I believe is not advised) then only one use can be accessing a certain resource at a certain time, this is to provide some security against eavesdropping.

The example I've seen (but can't remember where) is this:
Imagine user 1 is making a call, if user 2 can access the same mic and output user 1 is using then user 2 can eavesdrop into the conversation. If the idea is to give access to everything at the same time to all users then pulse should be run as a system daemon (I think I saw in the same place that this is not the "correct" way of doing things and is still supported only because of special cases).

On switching the output between 2 users giving preference to the active user, I have not seen anything, at least that I can remember.

On your xmonad session you may want to check if there is anything at all that may be capturing pulse, such as volume meters (or maybe some volume control utility).

ngoonee · 2010-10-17 23:07:57

R00KIE, I think you misunderstand a bit. Pulseaudio is meant to be active for the active user (meaning when you use fast-user-switching it should automatically give control of the soundcard to the active user). You're talking about the tangential point where some people want multiple users to access pulseaudio at the same time.

OP is asking about the first case.

R00KIE · 2010-10-18 13:14:47

Ok, did some testing and I can reproduce the behavior seen by the OP. It seems it is the expected behavior [1] if the users are in the audio group (check the 'Should users be in the "audio" group?' section).

The solution is to remove _all_ users from the audio group, re-login and things should be working properly. At least I could make it work properly by doing this. One more thing I've learned today

[1] http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup

tmske · 2010-10-25 18:04:06

Removing the users from the audio group works indeed, thank you!

Arch Linux

#1 2010-10-15 19:39:26

Multiuser pulseaudio issues

#2 2010-10-16 02:43:11

Re: Multiuser pulseaudio issues

#3 2010-10-16 08:52:58

Re: Multiuser pulseaudio issues

#4 2010-10-16 11:00:27

Re: Multiuser pulseaudio issues

#5 2010-10-16 12:19:35

Re: Multiuser pulseaudio issues

#6 2010-10-17 14:42:40

Re: Multiuser pulseaudio issues

#7 2010-10-17 19:16:46

Re: Multiuser pulseaudio issues

#8 2010-10-17 23:07:57

Re: Multiuser pulseaudio issues

#9 2010-10-18 13:14:47

Re: Multiuser pulseaudio issues

#10 2010-10-25 18:04:06

Re: Multiuser pulseaudio issues

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