Hi,
I just returned home after a short vacation to my running, completely up-to-date jessie system, and discovered that Pulse had stopped running, and I dont know how to get it going again.
Various of the startup commands give an error :"E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to initialize daemon." I've searched this up and down, and tried to remove the .config/pulse directory (there's no ~/.pulse), which had no effect.
Running pavucontrol shows a long error popup:
Connection to Pulse Audio failed. Automatic retry in 5s
In this case this is likely because PULSE_SERVER in the Environment/X11 Root Window Properties or default-server in client.conf is misconfigured
This situation can also arrise when PulseAudio crashed and left stale details in the X11 Root Window
If this is the case, then PulseAudio should autospawn again, or if this is not configured you should run start-pulseaudio-x11 manually
Trying start-pulseaudio-x11 gives either:
$ start-pulseaudio-x11
Connection failure: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused
or the "Daemon startup failed" error.
Googling this also didn't show anything that worked for me. I eventually tried reinstalling the main Pulse modules, but that had no effect.
I unplugged all of my audio devices (several USB connections), which had no effect.
Running pulseaudio -v gave too much info to quote here, but there was nothing obvious to me.
I don't know what to try anymore; I did, at one point, reboot the system (which I hate doing), but even that had no effect. Would welcome any thoughts!
Jen