Hello,
Well, there are several possible setups if you do have multiple users and you wish to allow both of them to play sound.
One approach however a bit sluggish is to setup alsa with dmix so multiple pulseaudio instances do have access to the alsa instance.
Another possibility and verified by Chrys, Storm and others running fenrir is starting first pulseaudio instance with a local socket writeable to the users who may also play sound on the system. Then multiple users can play audio through that first pulseaudio instance.
Depending on how one might look at this kind of setup this might be considered as a security concern on a multi-user system. I think it just works. The only issue with that is that this is not very popular setup.
Greetings
Peter
Peter Vágner <pvdeejay gmail com> wrote:
> I believe both approaches are awesome and good to know for advanced linux
> users.
> Some 10 to 13 years ago when pulseaudio was entirely new thing, alsas
> device ordering was the only usefull setup for these kinds of configs. I
> happily used that and it worked.
Pulse is an awesome, great thing in theory. You can have multiple streams, even over the network, can pick a default audio device no matter the kernel ordering without having to edit files in modprobe.d or /etc/modules or wherever your distro looks for it.
The only problem I have with pulse is that age old thing about not having speech in boht the console and the gui. You had to jump through hoops to get both working. The work around was to do something with pulse starting in daemon or system mode rather than user mode. But pulse didn't like you doing that for some reason.
I haven't played with pulse for a long time, so I don't know if this issue still exists. I'd rather just avoid it entirely where I can.