[BRLTTY] Hints for "modern" audio setup?

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Tue, 13 Oct 2015, Mario Lang wrote:

> adrian at pa0rda.nl writes:
> 
> > On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 04:57:56PM +0200, Mario Lang wrote:
> >> Hi.
> >> 
> >> I switched to a new workstation at work.  This machine apparently has no
> >> working PC beeper anymore.  While it appears in ALSA mixer, I can't get
> >> it to produce any sound, neither via plain console, nor via BRLTTY
> >> beeper output (and yes, the kernel module (forgot name) is loaded.)
> >
> > There are two groups involved in pulsaudio:
> > pulse:x:495:adrian,mail
> > pulse-access:x:494:adrian,mail
> >
> > As you can see I added myself and the mail user to these groups to enable
> > make noise.
> 
> I was probably too verbose to be crystal clear.  I dont have any problem
> getting audio via PulseAudio to work from my normal user.  My user can
> play audio, although it is *not* in the pulseaudio groups.  However,
> root can not.  I highly doubt adding root to any of the groups mentioned
> above would make any difference.

PulseAudio refuses connections from root users by design.  you probably 
can override that, but as you said this becomes a contrived setup.

You can use PulseAudio via the ALSA interface.  Normally PulseAudio 
configures a device into ALSA and makes ALSA's "default" point to it. 
Then PulseAudio does its mixing and such just to write back to the 
actual ALSA hardware device.  This special ALSA config is sometimes 
contained in its own package.

This won't change the fact that PulseAudio doesn't want to talk to you 
by default if you are root, whether this is directly or indirectly via 
ALSA.

It might be a good idea for brltty to be run under a special user for 
itself.  Then that user could be added to the pulseaudio group as well 
as the tty group to access the vcs devices.


Nicolas