[ATrpms-users] SL6, mythtv, "audio" group

[Axel Thimm]

On Thu, 2011-09-29 at 13:04 +0100, Neil Bird wrote:
> Around about 28/09/11 11:37, Brian Long typed ...
> > ...  There was not a ton of tweaking to do, but one thing I noticed
> > last night was that I needed to manually add the mythtv user to the audio
> > group. ...

This is a delicate setting - for years (or a decade) the audio group was
frowned upon in RHL/Fedora/RHEL. On other distributions like Debian it
had the semantics of "this user can use the sound devices".

With the current pulseaudio/alsa setups no application is supposed to go
directly to the hardware devices. Now if your minimal setup is NOT using
pulseaudio, then it's a different story.

OTOH being part of a group w/o actually using the group's privileges
(e.g. when mythtv by default doesn't try to access /dev/snd devices, but
tries pulseaudio first) wouldn't hurt, so I think we should add this.

>    You may well be OK having a minimalist install, but I found a Fedora or 2 
> ago that that was causing me problems.
> 
>    I had early-adopted pulseaudio (to try to fix an also issue, somewhat 
> ironically given PA's history), and at one point the recommendation had been 
> to put all desktop users in the 'audio' group.
> 
> 
>    However, with the coming of PolicyKit (or whatever it is that's doing it 
> now) I found that my personal login to our main PC was often freezing on 
> login.  I pinned it down to audio trying and failing (timing out, locking up 
> GNOME) and "fixed" it by making sure I was the first to login after a 
> power-up (no-one else seemed to see the issue), and disabling GDM sounds.
> 
> 
>    I found that nowadays, being a member of the audio group has a special 
> meaning, in that you are *always* allowed access to the sound devices, not 
> just when PK says your session is active.  This was locking out the devices 
> when user-switching.
> 
>    So, currently, my home users are *out* of this group again.

Do you think that would apply to the mythtv user setup as well?

>    Just mentioning it, I've not installed RHEL/CentOS/SL 6 for Myth yet 
> (will be) so don't know what state it's in, and, as I said, it probably 
> doesn't affect your setup

-- 
http://thimm.gr/ - http://ATrpms.net/
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