Arch Linux

Laplace's Daemon

Member

Registered: 2007-08-14

Posts: 30

Only KDE Programs have sound, root cannot open alsamixer

After a long time away from Arch, I just came back and installed it on my new Lenovo Thinkpad E420s laptop.

The sound output was working fine early yesterday, but I started having problems last night, and today it's not working well at all.  Originally, I thought it was an issue with flash, but then I was unable to get sound using "speaker-test -c 2".  I then noticed that the KDE system alert sounds were working.  Furthermore, media played with dragon player produces sound, but no sound is produced if I use vlc or mplayer.  Finally, I noticed that root is unable to open alsamixer, which gives the error:

ALSA lib pulse.c:229:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused

cannot open mixer: Connection refused

Trying to run "speaker-test" as root gives a similar error:

ALSA lib pulse.c:229:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused

Playback open error: -111,Connection refused

What's going on?

venoom27noom27

Member

From: Virginia

Registered: 2010-10-31

Posts: 11

Re: Only KDE Programs have sound, root cannot open alsamixer

I know with my Arch install if I am using Flash video and then try to open VLC I have to first close the webpage with Flash on it first. This also works the other way if I have VLC open and want to get audio for a webpage from Flash then I have to close VLC.

altercation

Member

From: Seattle

Registered: 2011-05-15

Posts: 136

Website

Re: Only KDE Programs have sound, root cannot open alsamixer

After a long time away from Arch, I just came back and installed it on my new Lenovo Thinkpad E420s laptop.

The sound output was working fine early yesterday, but I started having problems last night, and today it's not working well at all.  Originally, I thought it was an issue with flash, but then I was unable to get sound using "speaker-test -c 2".  I then noticed that the KDE system alert sounds were working.  Furthermore, media played with dragon player produces sound, but no sound is produced if I use vlc or mplayer.  Finally, I noticed that root is unable to open alsamixer, which gives the error:

ALSA lib pulse.c:229:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused

cannot open mixer: Connection refused

Trying to run "speaker-test" as root gives a similar error:

ALSA lib pulse.c:229:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused

Playback open error: -111,Connection refused

What's going on?

I'm just debugging this on my own x220 thinkpad right now. For what it's worth, the follow alsa/sound commands *do* work where the optionless variants fail with the identical error you list.

alsamixer -Dhw
speaker-test -Dhw -c 2

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Ethan Schoonover
Precision Colors - http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized