[Solved] Pulse Audio won't work on newly installed system with Gnome

Question

About a year ago I got a new computer and more or less retired my old one with my first arch install. Recently, I decided I would set it up as a Linux system for my sister. I first updated the computer, which broke it royally (since it was last updated before the /bin symlinking happened) but I eventually got it fixed. However, after doing that, Pulse Audio wouldn't work, then I broke X and decided to do a full reinstall.
Now, on this clean install, Pulse is again not working. I have set up Gnome and gdm to work, and everything works great except Pulse.  The wiki says that Pulse with Gnome 3 requires no extra setup, so I have not edited conf files at all. I have, however, installed "pulseaudio-alsa", which created this conf file:
# Use PulseAudio by default
pcm.!default {
type pulse
fallback "sysdefault"
hint {
show on
description "Default ALSA Output (currently PulseAudio Sound Server)"
ctl.!default {
type pulse
fallback "sysdefault"
# vim:set ft=alsaconf:
which seems fairly standard. Anyway, I tried removing it and had the same problems. When I have Pulse Audio running and try to play sound, I get the error:
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1022:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy
which is obviously trying for ALSA, or from mplayer:
AO: [pulse] Init failed: Connection refused
Running "pacmd list" nets me:
Daemon not responding.
and pavucontrol gives me:
Fatal Error: Unable to connect to PulseAudio: OK
when I try to start it.
No pulseaudio commands seem to work (e.g. pulseaudio -k). They don't raise any errors, but also it doesn't have any effect on the server.
The only asound conf file is "/etc/asound.conf", clearing ~/.config/pulse does not fix the issue.
Journalctl does not seem to give anything interesting (Stale PID is the only message when starting Pulse), though admittedly I'm just vgrepping all of journalctl since I don't know how to narrow it down more, nor does the output from pulseaudio -vvvv. There are a lot of errors in pulseaudio -vvvv, but they all appear to be related to loading devices that don't exist, and so I assume not a problem, I can post it if necessary. Sometimes when I kill Pulse the process refuses to go away and I have to reboot in order to clear the process out, but I don't think that's related.
If I kill Pulse or keep it from starting on boot, I can play sound, but only through ALSA, and while I didn't have the problem I expected (I can still play multiple things simultaneously) there's still the issue that the volume buttons in Gnome will no longer work and that the volume levels ALSA reports are basically nonsense to a human being.
I basically just blurbed everything I thought of/found on the wiki or forums, and I'm not really sure where to go from here. It's a fairly old computer, so that could be related, and I'd be willing to dump Pulse if Gnome could integrate well with ALSA, but obviously fixing Pulse would be the preferred option.
Any suggestions on where to look next? I've run out of ideas.
Thanks.
Last edited by HuFlungDu (2014-01-07 19:52:11)

Answer 1

Wonder if you have a conflict between two audio cards ... for example, I have a friend with some PulseAudio problems caused by conflict between the HDMI audio from his graphics card and his onboard sound. Something would switch PulseAudio to the wrong card and it would just quit after getting itself into a twist. Unsolved, I'm afraid, but have a look at commands such as:
aplay -l
pactl list sinks
pactl stat
(Latter two will need PulseAudio coaxed into life first)
and of course, the Arch wiki.
If there is a conflict, blacklisting kernel modules might also be needed.