[SOLVED] X-Autostart, Auto-log-in and DBus : a non-pulseaudio issue

Question

Hello,
besides the not-so-clear title, I've been investigating for what first looked like a pulseaudio problem for a while, and I'm now sharing what I found with you :
Pre-existing conditions
An Arch system with systemd, auto-loggin on a TTY and auto-start of X
Symptoms
Pulseaudio wouldn't start anymore at boot, but everything worked fine if it was started a while after, provided one would have sudo killall -9 pulseaudio before, and there was no major upgrade that could be related to this change.
Journalctl showed dbus related messages, saying that pulse wasn't able to find it, and a general failure in main.c start.
Solution
Actually, a part of the boot process was the following :
            |-----> lots of things, and at a point dbus
Init --> |
            |-----> auto-logging service (getty stuff) -----> .xinitrc ------> pulseaudio
and there was no guarantee that dbus was already started when pulse audio was.
To add this guarantee, edit your autologging service and add the following
[Unit]
... your stuff ...
#lines to add :
Requires=dbus.Service #I'm not sure this one is needed, if anyone here can confirm it
After=dbus.Service
..rest of the file..
reboot, and enjoy
Last edited by NougatRillettes (2012-12-30 16:05:02)

Answer 1

I know this is an older post, but I'm hoping by bumping it someone will be able to help me with this issue even though the thread is marked as [SOLVED], so that I won't have to create a new post.
I'm trying to set up a host to autologin a user, then automatically startx to enter a desktop environment.  I am using these guides:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/au … al_console
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Start_X_at_Login
I haven't yet set up the startx at login, but I've done that before, so I don't expect any issues or problems.
I successfully set up autologin using the first link and everything seemed fine.  However, on the startx at login wiki, it states:
Tips
This method can be combined with automatic login to virtual console. When doing this you have to set correct dependencies for the autologin systemd service to ensure that dbus is started before ~/.xinitrc is read and hence pulseaudio started (see: BBS#155416)
I don't have pulseaudio issues to worry about, but I do have an exec line to start lxde.  So, I followed that link to this thread and created the lines NougatRillettes suggested.  Here's the complete file:
/etc/systemd/system/[email protected]/autologin.conf
[Unit]
Requires=dbus.Service
After=dbus.Service
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/usr/bin/agetty --autologin <username> --noclear %I 38400 linux
Then, when I reboot the kernel spits this out:
Nov 06 14:39:23 [Host] systemd[1]: Set hostname to <[Host]>.
Nov 06 14:39:23 [Host] systemd[1]: [/etc/systemd/system/[email protected]/autologin.conf:2] Failed to add dependency on dbus.Service, ignoring: Invalid argument
Nov 06 14:39:23 [Host] systemd[1]: [/etc/systemd/system/[email protected]/autologin.conf:3] Failed to add dependency on dbus.Service, ignoring: Invalid argument
Nov 06 14:39:23 [Host] systemd[1]: Cannot add dependency job for unit display-manager.service, ignoring: Unit display-manager.service failed to load: No such file or directory.
I rechecked the wikis and noticed:
Tips & Tricks
Avoiding unnecessary dmesg errors
To avoid errors related to display-manager.service in dmesg, you should set the default target to multi-user instead of graphical:
# systemctl enable multi-user.target
So I went ahead and enabled multi-user.target and rebooted, thinking that would solve the problem, but it didn't...the error messages were the same.
I'm hoping someone can help...and maybe update those two wikis if there's any information missing.  I'm also wondering if I should reverse the last step I described by disabling multi-user.target.