speechd-up debian install question

[Janina Sajka]

Samuel Thibault writes:
> Bill Cox, le Sun 30 Oct 2011 10:49:30 -0400, a écrit :
> > Rob mentioned that it would be better if speechd-up would run as a
> > non-privileged user, rather than root.  I agree.  Is there a simple
> > way to get the speakup_soft module to be readable by a non-root user?
> 
> Simply chgrp/chmod /dev/softsynth. It could be useful to add to the
> documentation the udev rules to do that automatically.
> 
> > I guess my preference would be readable by all users, but of course
> > that let's anyone logged into the machine follow what's going on on
> > the console.  Ideally only the user logged into the console could
> > access /dev/synth.  Does anyone know if this is doable?
> 
> Such things are already done for sound & such, so it most probably is,
> probably in udev.
> 
I have a very hard time accepting the Linux sound environment as an
example of good practice, especially with respect to permissions.

For example, pulseaudio preventing root from playing audio is security gone wacko. It's also not a11y friendly, i.e. "give root password for system maintenance."

To my mind the proper model is the video display. Audio per;missions
should work the same way as video device permissions. On my machines,
/dev/vcs* are all chown root and chmod 660. What's wrong with that? And,
for the heck of it, why should /dev/ttsynth be more restricted?

Janina


> Samuel
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
		sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net

Chair, Open Accessibility	janina at a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org

Chair, Protocols & Formats
Web Accessibility Initiative	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)