Re: PulseAudio (Some users get sound, orthers do not)

[Marc Shapiro <marcnshap@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jul 08, 2017 at 11:35:42PM -0700, Marc Shapiro wrote:

At some point in the past I was having sound issues which I traced to pulseaudio.  I uninstalled pulseaudio and everything was fine.  Then Firefox decided to require pulseaudio and my sound (in Firefox) went away.

I reinstalled pulseaudio and eventually got it working (I thought).  Well, it was working for me, but not for my wife and daughter, apparently.  Both of them have recently let me know that they have been without sound for an indeterminate period of time.

This morning, I went to my wife's login and ran:

pulseaudio --kill

rm ~/.config/pulse

pulseaudio --start

And that worked.  There were some warnings about not being able to find the cookie file, which was understandable since I had just rm'd the configuration directory.  But pulseaudio recreated the directory and needed files and seems to be happy.  At least I am able to get sound from the command line, as well as from Firefox.


When I tried to do the same thing under my daughter's login, however, I get the warnings about the cookie file and ~/.config/pulse is NOT recreated, so still no sound anywhere.  I have checked the permissions of my daughter's  ~/.config/pulse directory and it is 644 with her user as owner and group.  That matches ~/.config in my home directory and my wife's.


So why does pulseaudio not create the files it needs, like it did for me and my wife?  Is there something else that I am missing? Any help will be appreciated.


Marc

I found out why ~/.config/pulse was not recreated under my daughter's login.  Her ~/home/ directory had a .pulse directory and a .pulse-cookie file (from an even older installation?).  Once I deleted them starting pulseaudio properly recreated ~/.config/pulse in my daughter's ~/home/ directory.  Unfortunately, still no sound for her.  My wife and I are both getting sound under our logins.


On 07/09/2017 05:52 AM, Wellington Terumi Uemura wrote:

Have you check your system log?

What dmesg tell you?

What should I be looking for in the logs?  I did not see anything that looked relevant in dmesg.

On 07/09/2017 11:33 AM, Wilko Fokken wrote:

my /etc/passwd:
- - - - - - - -
pulse:x:113:121:PulseAudio daemon,,,:/var/run/pulse:/bin/false

my /etc/group:
- - - - - - - -
audio:x:29:pulse,my_userid
pulse:x:121:my_userid
pulse-access:x:122:my_userid


my pulseaudio refresh (if no sound):
- - - - - - - - - - - 
pulseaudio --kill && alsamixer -c0

make sure 'pulseaudio' is loaded only once
(check with 'ps ax | grep pulseaudio')


Wilko

Usually, all three of us are logged in all the time, so pulseaudio is running under each of our logins:

~$ ps ax | grep pulseaudio
 3029 ?        S<l    0:07 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
 3065 ?        S<l    0:06 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
 3121 ?        S<l    0:19 pulseaudio --start
 4303 pts/0    S+     0:00 grep pulseaudio

Marc