Arch Linux

justin-8

Member

From: Queensland, Australia

Registered: 2013-06-18

Posts: 53

Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

Hey everyone,

After updating from 5.0 -> 6.0 of pulseaudio, it no longer loads on startup (running Gnome with GDM). If I downgrade pulseaudio and libpulse packages to 5.0 releases everything works fine again.

The first reboot after updating I also could only see the HDMI output on my laptop; no analog headphone/internal speaker device at all; that was fixed after rebooting again however. But I do still have to manually start pulseaudio after boot for sound to work.

I've searched around a bit on the net and the Arch forums and can't find any similar issues. Has anyone seen something like this before?

matthew02

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 42

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

If the line autospawn=no exists in the files ~/.pulse/client.conf and/or /etc/pulse/client.conf, change the value to yes and then restart.

Last edited by matthew02 (2015-02-16 19:33:05)

magor

Member

Registered: 2015-02-16

Posts: 4

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

Hi,

I think I have the same problem, except I'm using KDE. I'm not sure that the fix in turning on autospawn is desired. Pulseaudio should be started automatically by running /etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop, which in turn runs /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11. The last one ends like this:

$ start-pulseaudio-x11
Connection failure: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

There is someone with similar/same issue: http://askubuntu.com/questions/70560/wh … iled-error
Suggests to remove autospawn=no (defaults to yes) as well, but I'm still not sure if that's the right way.

matthew02

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 42

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

I'm not very learned about PulseAudio, but I did read the PulseAudio 6.0 Release Notes. Perhaps I am still misunderstanding things?

PulseAudio now supports systemd's socket activation. There's support only for unix sockets, though; support for TCP sockets will come later. PulseAudio ships with a ready-made socket file for starting the user instance, but it's not generally advisable to enable it, because doing so will likely prevent PulseAudio from accessing the D-Bus session bus, crippling some features that depend on the session bus. It's expected that in the future, systems that use systemd will replace the session bus with a user bus, at which point the socket activation support in PulseAudio will become usable more widely.

...

start-pulseaudio-x11 doesn't any more start PulseAudio explicitly, because explicit starting conflicts with using systemd to start the user instance. When systemd isn't used, the regular autospawning functionality will still make PulseAudio start. However, if the user has disabled autospawning in client.conf, then PulseAudio will not be started at all by start-pulseaudio-x11 (which may or may not be what the user wants).

And of interest to the KDE folks...

start-pulseaudio-kde has been merged into start-pulseaudio-x11 and pulseaudio-kde.desktop has been removed. The only thing that those KDE specific files did was to load module-device-manager at session startup, and that is now handled in start-pulseaudio-x11 (it's still done only for KDE sessions).

matthew02

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 42

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

Actually, autospawn defaults to yes, so it may make more sense to just comment out any autospawn=no lines in both the local client.conf and the global client.conf.

Raynman

Member

Registered: 2011-10-22

Posts: 1,539

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

Actually, autospawn defaults to yes, so it may make more sense to just comment out any autospawn=no lines in both the local client.conf and the global client.conf.

Well, the comment at the top of the file says "Default values are commented out." If you comment out autospawn=no, that is no longer correct, so I would still change it to "yes" or add a note.

stoychod

Member

Registered: 2015-02-19

Posts: 5

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

Hello guys I've been digging through pulseaudio package files this afternoon and have found the reason it is not starting automatically after the upgrade to 6.0.It's been driving me crazy for a few days .
This is from start-pulseaudio-x11 5.0:

/usr/bin/pulseaudio --start "$@"

if [ x"$DISPLAY" != x ] ; then

    /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-publish "display=$DISPLAY" > /dev/null
    #/usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-cork-request "display=$DISPLAY" > /dev/null

    if [ x"$SESSION_MANAGER" != x ] ; then
	/usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-xsmp "display=$DISPLAY session_manager=$SESSION_MANAGER" > /dev/null
    fi
fi

and this is from start-pulseaudio-x11 6.0:

if [ x"$DISPLAY" != x ] ; then

    /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-publish "display=$DISPLAY" > /dev/null
    #/usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-cork-request "display=$DISPLAY" > /dev/null

    if [ x"$KDE_FULL_SESSION" = x"true" ]; then
       /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-device-manager "do_routing=1" > /dev/null
    fi

    if [ x"$SESSION_MANAGER" != x ] ; then
	/usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-xsmp "display=$DISPLAY session_manager=$SESSION_MANAGER" > /dev/null
    fi
fi

As you can see the top line that actually starts pulseaudio server is missing in 6.0!!!Since that's the file that your DE uses to start pulseaudio it won't work any more I suppose  you can add the line back but I haven't tested it thou.There is a vague note on pulseaudio arch wiki page saying that autostarting won't work any more but they haven't suggested a solution!

Knute

Member

From: Minot, ND

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 604

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

I run xmonad and have a file in my ~/.xinitrc that does my startup stuff.  It's called right before the exec xmonad command.
In that file, I start pulseaudio with

pulseaudio &

That's it.

---

Knute

mkoskar

Member

Registered: 2014-07-16

Posts: 64

Website

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

I like to start PA manually when starting X session:

before:    pulseaudio --start
now:       systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service

I also have "autospawn = no" in "~/.config/pulse/client.conf" since I don't like idea of such autostarting.
Works well. Systemd manages socket and restarting in case of failure.

"pulseaudio --start" was also reentrant but always poluted logs with error level message that PA daemon is already running.
With systemd user service that is no longer the issue naturaly.

Daerun

Member

Registered: 2011-02-07

Posts: 97

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

I had this exact problem, and adding "Pulseaudio &" in .xinitrc solved it. But I don't think this should be considered the proper solution.

matthew02

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 42

Re: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup.

If there is a proper way, I would guess it is to use the systemd service or systemd socket activation. However, pending the transition to kdbus, the release notes advise against that because it can break a subset of features. If you want to use systemd but need those features, you can enable D-Bus as a systemd user service.