[K12OSN] Why PA system mode?

[Burke Almquist]

On Aug 12, 2011, at 1:12 PM, Jeff Siddall wrote:

> Anyone know why the clients run pulseaudio in system mode?  Here's an excerpt from the client system log:
> 
> Aug  9 09:12:06 client-192 pulseaudio[1740]: main.c: OK, so you are running PA in system mode. Please note that you most likely shouldn't be doing that.
> Aug  9 09:12:06 client-192 pulseaudio[1740]: main.c: If you do it nonetheless then it's your own fault if things don't work as expected.
> Aug  9 09:12:06 client-192 pulseaudio[1740]: main.c: Please read http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/WhatIsWrongWithSystemMode for an explanation why system mode is usually a bad idea
> 
> I did read http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/WhatIsWrongWithSystemMode and sure enough they say it is there for stuff like thin clients.  However, the reasons for it are really not that good: we _do_ have a real user, and things like home directories typically _aren't_ flushed on each session termination.
But we don't have a "real" user on the thin clients, the real user is logged into the server, not the client, so that doesn't help us, since PA needs to run on the client for it to output the sound. 
If you were doing DRBL, where you network boot the OS, but all the apps are actually local, then system mode doesn't make sense, but you still need it on thin clients, since the user's session is actually on a different machine.


> 
> Further, since PA is really designed to be run as a user, could we remove some headache by not having it tun in system mode (ie: not have to fixup permissions etc.)?
> 
> The reason I am interested is that it appears system mode causes problems with some pulse stuff like pulseaudio-equalizer.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jeff
> 
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