[CentOS] How to enable sound for other users but the one who owns the current session

Thu Jul 3 09:47:25 UTC 2014
James Pearson <james-p at moving-picture.com>

Hendrik Strydom wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-07-03 at 00:37 +0200, wwp wrote:
> 
>>Hello there!
>>
>>
>>I'm trying to get sound from applications running from other users bug
>>the one who owns the current GNOME sessions.
>>
>>Typically, my default user is "A" and he's running the GNOME session,
>>logged in graphically. From this session, I open terminals, su to other
>>users (B or C, non-root) and run mplayer or firefox. No sound for these.
>>
>>Adding those users to the "audio" group didn't help. Any idea how to do
>>this?
> 
> 
>>From very limited experience where I attempted it and got this to work
> with some semblance of reliability once long ago I can tell you that it
> involves something around:
> load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1

More details about this approach can be found via: (for example)

<http://billauer.co.il/blog/2014/01/pa-multiple-users/>

You can also run Pulseaudio in 'system mode' - see:

<http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/SystemWide/>

I haven't tried either of these approaches

You can also by-pass Pulseaudio and use ALSA directly by modifying the 
central ALSA config files (or overriding them via individual user 
configs) - I've done this for a single user on a workstation - but not 
for multiple users, but I guess with the correct dev perms this should 
work as well

James Pearson