Tried Pulse Audio Again--No Good For A11y

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed Sep 24 03:28:17 UTC 2008


Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 
>> Arbitrarily, as in guessing who should have exclusive access based on 
>> nothing that particularly relates to the specific audio device.  It is no 
>> more right than automatically killing scheduled tape backups would be 
>> because someone else logged in on a keyboard near the tape device.
> 
> We generally consider speakers/mikes/headphones to be part of the
> workplace of the user, i.e. together with mouse/keyboard/screen
> we switch them over when the active session changes. 

But, I rarely log on to the keyboard/screen attached to the machines 
running Linux.  NX is so good that there is rarely any need to.

> And again, that's the way *I* think it makes the most sense. 

If you haven't, give freenx/NX a try, floating your running session 
among displays at work, perhaps a wireless laptop, and pick them up from 
  home with everything still running.  And try it with several people 
sharing a machine.  You might get used to the concept that your devices 
are really not that closely coupled. Or perhaps at least that your 
session isn't tied to the local console.  X never intended it to be, but 
before freenx it wasn't that great remotely.

> Of course, you are free to consider audio to be hw that is completely
> detached from sessions. I disagree. Most of the RH engineers I talked
> to about this agree with how *I* see things. (And Apple too, ...)

Keep in mind that Apple makes a very good business out of selling things 
to help deal with what OS X lacks natively on the Macs.  For example you 
can't even drive two different output devices at once to have always-on 
built-in speakers plus a USB device feeding an amp that you can power up 
for more volume.   But they'll sell you an apple tv or airport express 
or ipod and dock to fix that for you.  And I didn't realize RH was very 
involved in audio at all.

> Nonetheless, I do see some sense in the way you want to use the audio
> devices. However, I don't think that would be the normal use-case, and I also
> don't think that defaulting to this insecure configuration would be a
> good choice.

The default isn't a particular problem - but that's not the only 
possible or even likely scenario, leaving the question of how to change 
the configuration.

> BTW, Free Software is about scratching your own itches. Apparently
> this functionality is very important to you, otherwise we wouldn't
> have this discussion again and again and again. Hence: I AM HAPPY TO
> MERGE YOUR PATCHES (if they are good)!

Realistically, something like mediatomb feeding an independent media 
player like the one included in a PS3 is probably a better solution for 
what I want but I can't help thinking that a linux box should be able to 
do it all by itself while still providing other services.

>> Exclusive access is OK.  Killing that access based on unrelated 
>> circumstances isn't.
> 
> We don't "kill" access. We suspend access until you reactivate your
> session.

So if I could get control of the local audio device in a remote X or 
freenx session that keeps running, would it keep control even if a 
different user logs on at the console?

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com




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