Users-admin, the audio privilege needs clarification

[David Henningsson]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-tools

In Lucid (haven't checked Maverick), there is the a privilege checkbox named "use audio devices". Checking this checkbox is the same as membership in the group named "audio".

Access to sound cards are allowed either through console-kit, to the currently logged in user, or through being member of the audio group. So in recent versions of Ubuntu, the default is to *not* be in the audio group, and let console-kit handle permissions.

We've had a few bugs of people having enabled these, then complaining about that when they're using fast-user-switching, their PA keeps playing music and thus blocking the new user from having audio.

The solution might be as simple as changing the text from "Use audio devices" to "Use audio devices even when logged out" or something similar, but I'm not sure.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: gnome-system-tools 2.30.0-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.39-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: f6f6c1db2c80d23ca163011ad01858b3
CheckboxSystem: 4ed15c40009aa6f7770f606350a390a2
Date: Thu Aug 12 21:20:07 2010
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=sv_SE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-system-tools

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

Subscribing ubuntu-audio-dev since it would be good for these people to know what will happen with this bug.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Definitely seems like a good thing for Maverick (string freeze isn't for another few weeks)

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Thanks for the report, this is indeed a very confusing behavior caused by inconsistencies between packages. But that's known as bug 433654 for a while. The suggested simple and dirty fix would even be to remove the group from the list, as "listening music when logged out" is a very weird case people could handle manually if they really need this. This is mostly a silly behavior which was never intended.

As you can see on the other report, I'd be in favor of removing that useless "audio" group by default, since users-admin's general idea is to list all groups that exist in hope they are useful, which is not the case obviously in Ubuntu ATM. But for Ubuntu, the easiest solution might be to hide it with a downstream patch.