Playing Sound on remote machines without physically logging on.

[mindrunner]

Hi, sorry for this nooish question, but here it goes:-

I have 2 fedora machines on my local network, a desktop & a laptop.

1) Desktop has music collection and connected to Hi-Fi
2) Laptop - primary machine, but no music

Ideally, what I'd like to do is ssh / vnc to my desktop, turn on the audio player (mplayer etc) and continue working on my laptop.

Here's the problem. I have to have physically logged in to the Desktop machine, so that the pulse-audio daemon has been started up, before I can play music.

This happens if I use ssh or vnc.

Is there any work around to this, or do I need to startup pulseaudio using a init script or something?