Re: 8 -> 9 update changing things
On Tuesday 11 January 2022 11:24:27 am Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 11:03:55AM -0500, Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote:
> > What I'm not clear on at this point is why the instance of it that's started by the system doesn't seem to work, while the one that I start manually at some point later on does.
>
> Pulse Audio is still quite mysterious to me as well. In fact, I have
> the exact opposite experience: if I start Pulse Audio from my .xsession
> file (the way I expected it should be done), that one always fails to
> work. Consistently. 100%, every time. Killing it and restarting it
> always gave a working instance. Again, 100%, every time.
What's puzzling to me is why it worked okay before my most recent upgrade, and doesn't work now, until I fire up another instance of it.
> But if I let it start itself automatically on demand, then it works
> straight out of the gate with no issues. So far, anyway!
How does that "on demand" thing work?
> This is with Debian 11 (and, I think, 'twas the same on version 10
> as well), starting X with "startx" from a console, with fvwm and no
> desktop environment.
This was 8, moved to 9, and I will (eventually) progress all the way to 11. But not just yet.
> The symptom of the non-working Pulse Audio was a complete lack of
> response to everything. Running "pavucontrol" would give me some
> message about not being able to contact the daemon, but I could see it
> running in "ps". Kill, restart, pavucontrol again, and it was all
> happy.
I don't do anything much under debian that needs to have sound working, so I hadn't noticed a problem until the virtualboxed Slackware didn't have sound any more, and there are a few things I do in there where I *do* want sound working. Firing up another instance of it at somebody's suggestion took care of that problem, though I did have to reboot the virtualbox in order for it to see it.
> Sadly, I don't know enough to offer any helpful advice. All I can give
> you are some questions that you might ask yourself to try to gather
> more information about the issue:
>
> What version of Debian?
According to /etc/debian_version 9.3...
> How do you log in?
I often log in as root.
> How do you start your graphical session, if you use one?
The initial login screen is graphical, from which I can select different desktop environments. At the moment (and for quite a long time) I'm running Xfce.
> Which graphical session, if any, are you using?
I'm not sure I understand the question here.
> How does Pulse Audio get started (if you know)? What do you see in "ps"?
Looking at it in System Monitor, I see two instances of it. One has the user name "Debian-gdm" and when I mouse over it shows "parent = systemd". This is the one that the system starts up. The other one is the one that I started from a command line, which is otherwise the same. Right-clicking on either of these and selecting "show detailed memory information" shows very different results for the two of them, more memory being used for the second instance.
> What are the exact symptoms?
I'm not seeing any symptoms on the debian side of things, but haven't tried to do much with sound there. The sound _does_ work when, ferinstance, I view a video on youtube or similar. When booting the virtualbox, I'd get an error message from Slackware that it wasn't able to connect to the pulseaudio daemon and was going to use the "null" audio device instead, meaning that sound didn't work in there at all. After invoking pulseaudio in a terminal on the debian side of things and rebooting the virtual box sound in there works fine.
> Are there any error messages? If so, what do they say, and how do you
> see them?
See the above paragraph about during the boot process of the virtualbox.
> What steps do you perform when you restart Pulse Audio?
I haven't tried restarting it, just firing it up as someone suggested, using pulseaudio --start in a terminal window.
> What does "ps" show after that?
Not using ps here, for the most part. I'm looking at stuff in System Monitor.
> The answers to those might help someone else help you. We can hope, anyway.
I'll get a handle on this sooner or later...
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
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Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
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