how is pulseaudio supposed to work?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sun, 16.12.07 09:46, Richi Plana (myfedora at richip.dhs.org) wrote:

> Again, ideally, services (including system ones) should 1) only be
> started and 2) actually be started when it is called for. Something
> similar to the way kernel modules are autoloaded when there's a need for
> the service. Or xinetd does for some services which use it (though with
> an option to actually stay resident).

Besides (very few) exceptions, kernel drivers are nowadays loaded when
the hardware they driver becomes available -- and not only when they
are used. 

You can configure PA so that it is autospawned when needed. However, I
do not recommend this. I recommend to start it from the session
manager like we do it right now for KDE and GNOME. Why? Because PA
nowadays does much more than just proxying access to the hw. It reacts
on hotplug events, network configuration changes, certain X11 events,
it is a network server, and so on and so on. For all these reasons it
is better to leave PA running all the time.

If you don't use any kind of session manager, then I fear you have to
start PA manually right now.

Currently the situation with starting PA is not perfect. First, if
have deactivated the "start ESD" gconf checkbox they don't get
sound. That's especially a problem with uprgades from F7. Secondly, we
don't really support console logins. Thirdly, we don't really support
multiple logins by the same user. There have been some discussions how
to fix that, but we've not really come to any conlusion on this yet.

Anyway, in summary: I strongly believe that the SM is the place to
start PA, and starting it by auto-spawning is a bad idea.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4