Bug#712209: pulseaudio: getting no audio

[Felipe Sateler]

On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 4:19 AM, Francesca Ciceri <madamezou at zouish.org> wrote:
> Hi Felipe,
>
> thanks for your reply.
>
> In the meanwhile, the output of  "pulseaudio -k; pulseaudio -vvvv" it's
> a bit changed: I guess some update on other packages has influenced it,
> but there's no longer the "permission denied" issue.
> Still no audio, though.
>
> (At the time, the /run/user/1000/pulse dir was root:root, I remember
> checking it after a bit of googling on this issue, and it was so
> *before* doing the "alsactl init" trick)
>
> New (extremely long) output for "pulseaudio -k; pulseaudio -vvvv" is
> attached (pulseaudio.txt).
>
> New output for "pactl list" is attached as well (pactl.txt).
>
> [As they are both long I thought it was better to just attach them,
> instead of putting them in the body of the mail]
>
> And here's the permission situation on /run/user/1000 *before doing an
> "alsactl init"*:
>
> madamezou at malatesta:~$ ls -la /run/user/1000/
> total 0
> drwx------ 5 madamezou madamezou 100 May 29 09:07 .
> drwxr-xr-x 3 root      root       60 May 29 08:58 ..
> drwx------ 2 madamezou madamezou  60 May 29 08:59 dconf
> drwx------ 2 madamezou madamezou  40 May 29 08:59 gvfs
> drwx------ 2 madamezou madamezou  40 May 29 09:39 pulse
>
>
> Which changes after the "alsactl init" in:
>
> root at malatesta:/home/madamezou# alsactl init
> Found hardware: "HDA-Intel" "ATI R6xx HDMI"
> "HDA:1002aa01,00aa0100,00100200" "0x17aa" "0x5104"
> Hardware is initialized using a generic method
> root at malatesta:/home/madamezou# ls -la /run/user/1000/
> total 0
> drwx------ 5 madamezou madamezou 100 May 29 09:07 .
> drwxr-xr-x 3 root      root       60 May 29 08:58 ..
> drwx------ 2 madamezou madamezou  60 May 29 08:59 dconf
> drwx------ 2 madamezou madamezou  40 May 29 08:59 gvfs
> drwx------ 2 root      root       80 May 29 09:44 pulse
>
> (And after this I get sound again).
>
> After this, if I try the "pulseaudio -k; pulseaudio -vvvv" I get again
> the permission denied issue, as I suppose the alsactl init has messed up
> with the permissions.
>
> Whenever I kill the pulseaudio process again, I guess it reverts the
> alsctl initialization and I got again no sound.
>
>> > E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to kill daemon: Permission denied
>>
>> That also doesn't look good, probably related to the above. Also, is
>> there another pulseaudio process running?
>
> Not according to top. (Wasn't sure if you wanted the output of top as
> well, just let me know if you need it).

Top may not display it because of limited space. What does `ps -fea |
grep pulse` say?

>
>
> So, to summarize:
> 1. normally I don't get audio, but I don't have any permission denied
> issue, and the /run/user/1000/pulse dir is madamezou:madamezou
>
> 2. after the "alsactl init" I get audio again (at least until I kill the
> pulseaudio process), but I do have permission issues in the output of
> "pulseaudio -vvvv" and in fact the /run/user/1000/pulse dir is root:root
>
> Hopefully this doesn't sound confusing to you as it does to me :).

This is a bit confusing for me too ;). Perhaps the permission denied
results in pulseaudio not starting, and thus you get audio when there
is no pulseaudio running?

What happens if you use aplay -D hw:1,0 -c 2 <wavfile> when pulseaudio
is not working? Do you get sound? Use aplay -l to find out a suitable
number to put after the hw: part, and try 1 and 2 for the -c option.

Also, when pulseaudio is not working, does pavucontrol show you
anyhing in the output devices?

-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler