Words by c.z.robertson

I have a vision for a piece of software I want for Linux. Someone must have done it before, but I can't find it.

The aim is to allow non-root users to easily get higher than ordinary priority on multimedia apps that root has explicitly approved. It would work like this: There would be a config file in /etc which would contain a list of trusted apps and the priority levels they were allowed to run at. It might look something like this:

# Give players some boost
/usr/bin/rhythmbox    -5
/usr/bin/xmms         -5

# Give editors more boost
/usr/bin/audacity     -10

Then there would be a little wrapper program that started these apps with the right priority, so if you ran

dream-priority-launcher /usr/bin/xmms myfile.mp3

XMMS would start with a priority of -5.

It wouldn't be at all difficult to write. Indeed, I might do it myself someday. But surely someone's done it already. There are other far more sophisticated tools such as VeryNice and AND, but I don't really want something that runs as a daemon. I also don't want to create wrapper scripts for each program individually.

Suggestions?

Updated 2004-07-04: Earlier versions said "higher than ordinary privileges" when what I meant to say was priority. Cut me some slack. I was writing at five in the morning.