pulseaudio for Debian (and Ubuntu) ---------------------------------- The pulseaudio executable is installed suid root. In the near future, the current Suggests for rtkit may be promoted, as upstream developers strongly recommend that latter approach instead. The original intent of its suid status was to allow running with realtime priority (now handled by rtkit). After grabbing the realtime capability, pulseaudio drops all other root privileges. Historically, only users in the pulse-rt group were granted realtime privileges. PLEASE NOTE: PulseAudio's default configuration uses high quality sample rate conversion that may be overly CPU intensive. If PulseAudio's CPU usage is unacceptable on your hardware, please change the resample-method option in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to either src-linear or trivial. See daemon.conf for more details. -- Daniel T Chen Fri, 17 Dec 2010 20:14:50 -0500 based on work by -- CJ van den Berg , Mon, 28 Aug 2006 00:31:10 +0200 In Ubuntu 9.10 and later releases, the default resampling option has been set to speex-float-1. Also note that per-user session daemon invocation is used (see comments in /etc/default/pulseaudio). If you wish to prevent per- user session daemons from being invoked, remember to edit /etc/pulse/client.conf (or create ~/.pulse/client.conf) and ensure that "autospawn = no" is present and uncommented. In Ubuntu 10.04, CJ's caveat above regarding suid root is no longer applicable thanks to a Linux 2.6.32 base and the use of RtKit. Please use "ubuntu-bug pulseaudio" to file defect reports. -- Daniel T Chen , Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:57:30 -0500