Arch Linux

frankenstein

Member

Registered: 2022-07-12

Posts: 13

Pulseaudio's config mysteriously owned by root

I don't know when this happened, but suddenly my KDE sound manager reported no device was found after a reboot.

pulseaudio.service and pulseaudio.socket all failed but the displayed reason didn't provide much information:

pulseaudio.socket: Failed with result 'service-start-limit-hit'

Then I tried pacmd list-sinks and got a permission-denied error. It could not access ~/.config/pulse.

It turned out that this directory was owned by root, and everything else under ~/.config was owned by myself. I know pulse should be a user service so I chown-ed it back and hoped it would work. The sound was back again indeed. (This is the right action to do, no?)

But why is this? How can I find out who ate my sound by polluting the permissions (especially after a system-wide update)? (I'm new to Arch but I've gone through a CS degree so feel free to tell me anything deep.)

skunktrader

Member

From: Brisbane, Australia

Registered: 2010-02-14

Posts: 1,582

Re: Pulseaudio's config mysteriously owned by root

The usual cause of things like this is using sudo to run anything that writes to the config file

Section8

Member

Registered: 2023-05-12

Posts: 21

Re: Pulseaudio's config mysteriously owned by root

FYI, I've had the same thing happen a couple of times, maybe once a month or so.  After booting up my system, nothing will produce audio because my ~/.config/pulse directory is owned by root.  chown back to my user fixes it, until it happens again.  I haven't been able to figure out what causes it.