[winswitch] Pulseaudio in Xpra 3 on RHEL 7

[Antoine Martin]

On 15/04/2021 20:49, Eric Lemings via shifter-users wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
> Was hoping someone could shed some light on this.  I'm using Xpra 3.0.9 on
> RHEL 7 systems.
Let's start here: the current version for RHEL7 is 3.0.13

> When I launch an `xpra start` command even with the --pulseaudio=no option,
> the xpra process still launches pactl and pulseaudio child processes.  In
> my environment, there seem to be DBus/SELinux issues that cause these child
> processes to hang so the Xpra session takes about 5 minutes to (timeout I
> assume and) go from UNKNOWN to LIVE.
> 
> Is there some other way to avoid the pulseaudio checks in an Xpra start
> command?
What happens is that xpra runs "pactl" (ie: "pactl info") to figure out
the system's audio configuration - even if pulseaudio was not started by
xpra. Any calls to "pactl" seem to have the side effect of starting an
instance of pulseaudio if one isn't running yet...

On my test systems, this takes mere milliseconds to run.
If your system takes minutes, perhaps you should figure out what it's
getting stuck on and fix that.

You can ensure that this audio probing does not happen by adding:
"--speaker=no --microphone=no" to your command line. This will
completely skip the loading of all the audio modules.
An easier way might be to just completely remove the audio components
from your installation:
yum remove python2-xpra-audio

Cheers,
Antoine


> 
> Thanks,
> Eric.
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