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pi_audio/root-README.md
Me Here 9507f259d9 Add audio hub maintenance guide and root redirect README 
README.md: maintenance guide describing how the adac PipeWire audio
hub is wired together — the four audio paths, the five config drop-ins,
services, firmware, and common maintenance tasks. Written as a mental
model for upkeep rather than install/troubleshooting commands.

root-README.md: short redirect telling anyone on the root account to
log in as the `user` account (PipeWire is a per-user service), pointing
to the maintenance guide.

These mirror the files deployed at /home/user/README.md and
/root/README.md on the Pi.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-06-15 07:23:55 -05:00

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Don't manage audio from the root account

This Pi (adac) is a PipeWire audio hub, but the audio system does not run as root. It runs as the user account (uid 1000). PipeWire is a per-user service, so pactl, wpctl, bluetoothctl, and systemctl --user only work when you are logged in as user — run as root they talk to an empty session and everything looks broken even when it's fine.

Log in as user instead

ssh user@adac.local      # or: ssh user@10.12.10.110

Then read /home/user/README.md — that's the maintenance guide explaining how the whole system is wired together and how to keep it running.

If you are already stuck at a root shell

You can reach the audio session without logging out by prefixing commands:

sudo -u user XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 pactl info

But prefer just logging in as user. Root is only needed for the handful of system-level pieces (Bluetooth daemon, Avahi, firmware config in /boot/firmware/config.txt); those are documented in /home/user/README.md too.