pulseaudio run as root

Question

I have Ubuntu 12.04 installed on my PC, recently I have edited /etc/passwd and changed

user1:x:00:00:user1,,,:/home/user1:/bin/bash

to give root permission to user1 and the system always need to login as root, for running some custom software.

Now it seems the sound is not working, the volume icon is disabled. I understand that the pulseaudio demon can't be run as root that's why the audio is not working. How can I resolve it, like set the permission of pulseaudio to run as root.

When I type the command

 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start

Giving me the output

W: [pulseaudio] main.c: This program is not intended to be run as root (unless --system is specified).
E: [autospawn] core-util.c: Home directory /home/user1 not ours.
W: [autospawn] lock-autospawn.c: Cannot access autospawn lock.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to acquire autospawn lock

Answer 1

“Give root permission to user1” is imprecise. What you actually did was to make user1 an alias for the root user. What determines the identity of a user is the user ID, not the name. The name is just what you type when you log in (that also determines what shell you get and what group you're in, but that's about it). Now “the system always login as root for some reason” — well, yes, the reason is that you are logging in as root.

Some programs don't expect to run as root and won't work properly.

You need to repair the entry in /etc/passwd to give user1 their user ID back. Then change the ownership of all files in user1's home directory back:

find /home/user1 ! -type l -uid 0 -exec chown user1 {} +

Then log out and back in, and your system should work again. Some bad side effects of the current problem may remain; be careful about changing files' permissions and ownership if you don't know exactly what you're doing. If in doubt, ask here.