Pulseaudio does not autostart properly

English Multimedia
1

Hi. I am running openSUSE 13.2 (KDE), Pulseaudio 6.0 (from multimedia:libs repository)

After some experiments with QJackCtl and Cadence, my system does not auto start Pulseaudio on boot anymore. I am trying to investigate how that happened and want to find a proper solution how to make pulse autostarting again.

I managed to almost fix the autostart issue with systemd: i noticed that pulseaudio user-level service is not enabled, and then i enabled it with command:


systemctl --user enable pulseaudio

This works, now pulseaudio does autostart after user login, but it fails to connect to D-Bus. This is crucial for me as i want to use jack_dbus to handover audio devices to jack, so currently this functionality does not work. In the syslog D-Bus connection errors can be seen:


E: [pulseaudio] module-jackdbus-detect.c: Unable to contact D-Bus session bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPL
E: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-jackdbus-detect" (argument: "channels=2"): initialization failed.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Module load failed.

W: [pulseaudio] server-lookup.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11
W: [pulseaudio] main.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11

So i have few questions:

  1. What is the default openSUSE way to autostart pulseaudio (i mean how it is handled on clean OS installation).
  2. How can i make my system properly autostart pulseaudio, with its DBus service?
2

Why are you using --user?? You want it for system

3

There is no system-wide pulseaudio service. Should i install some package to get it? And… will it fix the issue with d-bus?


# systemctl status pulseaudio
pulseaudio.service
   Loaded: not-found (Reason: No such file or directory)
   Active: inactive (dead)

pulseaudio package only provides user-level systemd services:


/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service
/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.socket
4

I’m a little confused about you saying you installed a pulse audio version. You are not using the default PA that come installed in openSUSE??? Did you first remove the normal version???

5

I have replaced standard pulseaudio-5 with pulseaudio-6 from multimedia:libs repo.
Now i downgraded to pulseaudio-5 and everything works fine - it does autostart with system and can connect to d-bus.

Regarding pulseaudio-6 I think i found relevant info here: Pulseaudio 6.0 no longer loads on startup. / Multimedia and Games / Arch Linux Forums
It says that the package pulseaudio-module-x11 of version 6 will not start actual pulsaudio daemon anymore. It relies on systemd or on autospawn functionality. So i figured how to make systemd start it, but it has issues with d-bus. Autospawn somehow does not work for me, despite the fact that it is enabled in /etc/pulse/client.conf

I think i will be happy with older pulseaudio for now, but if someone knows the proper autostart solution for version 6 - you are welcome to chime in =)

6

Maybe try tumbleweed??? Much newer stuff. But if 5 works for you…