Pulseaudio Server and Artsd Server Startup

I have observed that the pulseaudio daemon in Fedora 10 runs on demand, when a sound is being played.

In older distros, artsd was running as a deamon.

Could someone explain or point me to a document describing how the pulse daemon/artsd are being automatically started? Is it alsa which starts it or not?

I have looked at rc.d and other obvious places and cannot find out how it gets started.

Also, I am running X without KDE or Gnome, therefore the pulse daemon must be started from somewhere else.

Originally Posted by cxs Also, I am running X without KDE or Gnome, therefore the pulse daemon must be started from somewhere else.

I am kind of in the same boat. I am running fvwm rather than gnome or KDE. I think the pulse daemon is tied into those two window managers directly.

Originally Posted by kromberg I am kind of in the same boat. I am running fvwm rather than gnome or KDE. I think the pulse daemon is tied into those two window managers directly.

I would like to point out two scripts in F10:

/usr/bin/esdcompat: which redirects to pulseaudio, and
/usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11: which apparently starts the pulse daemon server

I also traced the ppid of pulseaudio and it seems to be gconf-helper, which is another pulseaudio executable in /usr/libexec/pulse/gconf-helper

However, what I am still unable to trace is where/how the deamon is started: looked at /etc/X11 and cannot see anything, looked at /etc/rc*, the same. On possibility is that it's started from alsa itself due to the presence of pulse in its configuration files...