pulseaudio group pulse-rt

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Mon May 5 20:43:10 UTC 2008


On Sun, 2008-05-04 at 01:10 -0700, Andrew Farris wrote: 
> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Sat, 2008-05-03 at 14:45 -0700, Andrew Farris wrote:
> >> Neal Becker wrote:
> >>> I see these messages:
> >>>
> >>> May  3 17:30:33 nbecker1 pulseaudio[31536]: main.c: Called SUID root and
> >>> real-time/high-priority scheduling was requested in the configuration.
> >>> However, we lack the necessary priviliges:
> >>> May  3 17:30:33 nbecker1 pulseaudio[31536]: main.c: We are not in
> >>> group 'pulse-rt' and PolicyKit refuse to grant us priviliges. Dropping SUID
> >>> again.
> >>> May  3 17:30:33 nbecker1 pulseaudio[31536]: main.c: For enabling real-time
> >>> scheduling please acquire the appropriate PolicyKit priviliges, or become a
> >>> member of 'pulse-rt', or increase the RLIMIT_NICE/RLIMIT_RTPRIO resource
> >>> limits for this user.
> >>>
> >>> But I AM in pulse-rt group.  Seems strange.  Either it's broken, or perhaps
> >>> this message was posted when I was not logged in?  (Doesn't say what user
> >>> it's complaining about, but I'm the only account on this machine)
> >>>
> >> Use the authorizations tool in system->preferences->system to set yourself as 
> >> authorized by policykit for realtime pulseaudio.  That should then take care of 
> >> it I think, and you might be right its not really running under your user at the 
> >> time (not positive about that).
> > 
> > And on The Other Desktop Environment (KDE) that would be where?
> 
> I don't know, try rpm -ql PolicyKit, or rpm -qa '*policy*' since I think there 
> is a gnome-policykit or something like that.  Or you could just logout and try 
> it where you know it is which would have taken less time than me replying. 
> Using 'find' would get it for you too if you went looking for .desktop files and 
> grepped them for Authorizations.

Of course. This was a meta-message (see my related beefing about Fedora
being a Gnome system that also supports KDE). I guess you weren't in
irony detection mode ---
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> > Sorry for the sarcasm, but I'm getting really tired of the screwed-up

Never mind. Probably not a good idea to harp on about it at this stage
in a release cycle, as you point out.

> > audio on Fedora. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It was
> > working up till a few days ago, then it stopped. I've changed *nothing*
> > except for applying updates. There are no error messages or indications
> > of any kind of problem in the logs. 
> 
> 'except for applying updates'... then you changed things.  Go see what changed, 
> thats what /var/log/yum.log, /var/log/rpm* and gpk-log are for.  What updates 
> did you apply and when?  The kernel most likely, did you boot to the new one or 
> not yet?

yum.log is useful when one can remember when the problem started.
gpk-log doesn't seem to do anything useful. I hit the Rollback button
and it simply crashes. There doesn't seem to be any documentation for it
in any case.

> We are neck deep in prerelease time which means lots of debugging information is 
> reduced, the kernel is being quieted (remove 'quiet' from grub) and other 
> debugging is turned off... you need to install many debuginfo packages, start 
> with "debuginfo-install amarok pulseaudio" and go from there.

I set that up and it offered to download 327MB of updates. Since I'm on
a 1Mbps DSl line, I'll take it under advisement.

> > Amarok claims to be playing a track,
> > and even shows the equalizer histogram, but nothing is coming out of the
> > speakers. Yes they are plugged in, yes they are powered on, yes the
> > volume is turned up.
> > 
> > Maybe this is a Pulse Audio problem, maybe it isn't. I have *no idea*
> > how to start diagnosing it. I have never understood the relationship
> > between the multiple bits of audio software, which of them cooperate,
> > which are mutually exclusive, which work, which don't. Most of the docs
> > talk about one component with no reference to any others or how they all
> > fit together. The audio settings dialogue on both KDE and Gnome is a
> > joke. Does anyone really expect an end-user to understand this?
> 
> Let me clarify things for you.  Arts should still be current and usable if you 
> prefer to skip using pulseaudio altogether in KDE.  The same is true for alsa in 
> GNOME.  You may select that in the settings dialogue and remove pulseaudio from 
> your session so the daemon isn't running and pulse should just be gone.

I had success earlier (a week or two ago) by completely eliminating PA.
This time that didn't work.

So I connected an ipod to the speaker system input jack, and that didn't
work either.

*Then* I noticed the 'mute' button was depressed ...

Apologies for the <irony>noise</irony>.

poc

PS Even though this time it was all my own fault, I still maintain that
audio problems are too hard to diagnose when it's *not* a case of user
idiocy, because there's no clear explanation of the underlying model.
Compare/contrast with the case of the display model. Anyway, that's a
conversation for another time.




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