pulseaudio became unusable on F26 with the upgrade to vers 11.1.2 a few weeks ago. It rapidly filled the log files with trash - and produced no sound. By using dnf downgrade "*pulseaudio*" I was able to restore sanity.
Yesterday I freshly installed Fedora 27 Live Xfce on an Acer laptop. Today, /var/log/messages had grown to -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 14787172 Nov 22 15:47 messages These 15 MB contain recurring lines like this:
Nov 22 11:22:18 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16113 of pr ocess 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' high priority at nice level -11 . Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16116 of process 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' RT at priority 5. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16121 of process 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' RT at priority 5. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] socket-server.c: bind(): Address already in use Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-esound-protocol-unix" (argument: ""): initialization failed. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Module load failed. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to initialize daemon. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16110]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.
which repeat every 5 seconds, and will rapidly destroy my system.
I've fought with this miserable pulseaudio creation for several years, trying to get sound to work *properly*, but this is the last straw.
Today I held an exorcism and have slain the damned thing: dnf remove pulseaudio which, amazingly, took out 34 packages.
Sound now works perfectly - just the way it should. I cannot discern any important loss of function from the deleted 34 packages so far. aplay, vlc, xmms, mythfrontend and even skypeforlinux all work fine with alsa.
pulseaudio should just go away!
On 11/23/17 06:36, David A. De Graaf wrote:
pulseaudio became unusable on F26 with the upgrade to vers 11.1.2 a few weeks ago. It rapidly filled the log files with trash - and produced no sound. By using dnf downgrade "*pulseaudio*" I was able to restore sanity.
Yesterday I freshly installed Fedora 27 Live Xfce on an Acer laptop. Today, /var/log/messages had grown to -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 14787172 Nov 22 15:47 messages These 15 MB contain recurring lines like this:
Nov 22 11:22:18 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16113 of pr ocess 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' high priority at nice level -11 . Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16116 of process 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' RT at priority 5. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16121 of process 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' RT at priority 5. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] socket-server.c: bind(): Address already in use Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-esound-protocol-unix" (argument: ""): initialization failed. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Module load failed. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to initialize daemon. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16110]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.
which repeat every 5 seconds, and will rapidly destroy my system.
I've fought with this miserable pulseaudio creation for several years, trying to get sound to work *properly*, but this is the last straw.
Today I held an exorcism and have slain the damned thing: dnf remove pulseaudio which, amazingly, took out 34 packages.
Sound now works perfectly - just the way it should. I cannot discern any important loss of function from the deleted 34 packages so far. aplay, vlc, xmms, mythfrontend and even skypeforlinux all work fine with alsa.
pulseaudio should just go away!
Just a FWIW....
I'm running F27 with KDE and pulseaudio-11.1-6.fc27. The HW on one system is an Acer Aspire 5920 which I think is about 8 yrs old.
The audio device is
[root@acer log]# lspci | grep -i audio 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
0 problems with pulseaudio
Also 0 problems on my HP systems.
David A. De Graaf writes:
Today I held an exorcism and have slain the damned thing: dnf remove pulseaudio which, amazingly, took out 34 packages.
Sound now works perfectly - just the way it should. I cannot discern any important loss of function from the deleted 34 packages so far. aplay, vlc, xmms, mythfrontend and even skypeforlinux all work fine with alsa.
pulseaudio should just go away!
Unfortunately, Firefox requires pulseaudio for sound. Firefox is not packaged with a dependency on pulseaudio, but without it installed you want hear all the important parts of car crash videos on Youtube.
On 11/22/17 19:38, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
David A. De Graaf writes:
Today I held an exorcism and have slain the damned thing: dnf remove pulseaudio which, amazingly, took out 34 packages.
Sound now works perfectly - just the way it should. I cannot discern any important loss of function from the deleted 34 packages so far. aplay, vlc, xmms, mythfrontend and even skypeforlinux all work fine with alsa.
pulseaudio should just go away!
Unfortunately, Firefox requires pulseaudio for sound. Firefox is not packaged with a dependency on pulseaudio, but without it installed you want hear all the important parts of car crash videos on Youtube.
You're right, Sam. Firefox IS defective. However, I'm listening to Patricia Kopatchinskaja on Google Chrome quite successfully:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4llgOi6MZI Somewhat more edifying and enjoyable than car crashes.
I guess this shows that Firefox, like gnome, has better alternatives.
It's really sad that so many programs tie themselves to specific environments instead of using generalized functionality. Linux, and Fedora in particular, need more attention to interface specs instead of whizbang features.
On 11/22/2017 05:36 PM, David A. De Graaf wrote:
pulseaudio became unusable on F26 with the upgrade to vers 11.1.2 a few weeks ago. It rapidly filled the log files with trash - and produced no sound. By using dnf downgrade "*pulseaudio*" I was able to restore sanity.
Yesterday I freshly installed Fedora 27 Live Xfce on an Acer laptop. Today, /var/log/messages had grown to -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 14787172 Nov 22 15:47 messages These 15 MB contain recurring lines like this:
Nov 22 11:22:18 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16113 of pr ocess 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' high priority at nice level -11 . Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16116 of process 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' RT at priority 5. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16121 of process 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' RT at priority 5. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] socket-server.c: bind(): Address already in use Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-esound-protocol-unix" (argument: ""): initialization failed. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Module load failed. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to initialize daemon. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16110]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.
which repeat every 5 seconds, and will rapidly destroy my system.
I've fought with this miserable pulseaudio creation for several years, trying to get sound to work *properly*, but this is the last straw.
Today I held an exorcism and have slain the damned thing: dnf remove pulseaudio which, amazingly, took out 34 packages.
Sound now works perfectly - just the way it should. I cannot discern any important loss of function from the deleted 34 packages so far. aplay, vlc, xmms, mythfrontend and even skypeforlinux all work fine with alsa.
pulseaudio should just go away!
Can you now play a video thru your computer and monitor and local sound speakers and at the same time send an htmi signal to your TV set that includes cideo and sound? I don't think so. With the damned pulseaudio and sufficient messing around, you can do that.
--doug
On Wed, 22 Nov 2017 20:10:19 -0500 Doug dmcgarrett@optonline.net wrote:
On 11/22/2017 05:36 PM, David A. De Graaf wrote:
pulseaudio became unusable on F26 with the upgrade to vers 11.1.2 a few weeks ago. It rapidly filled the log files with trash - and produced no sound. By using dnf downgrade "*pulseaudio*" I was able to restore sanity.
Yesterday I freshly installed Fedora 27 Live Xfce on an Acer laptop. Today, /var/log/messages had grown to -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 14787172 Nov 22 15:47 messages These 15 MB contain recurring lines like this:
Nov 22 11:22:18 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16113 of pr ocess 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' high priority at nice level -11 . Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16116 of process 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' RT at priority 5. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer rtkit-daemon[4896]: Successfully made thread 16121 of process 16113 (/usr/bin/pulseaudio) owned by 'dad' RT at priority 5. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] socket-server.c: bind(): Address already in use Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-esound-protocol-unix" (argument: ""): initialization failed. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Module load failed. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16113]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to initialize daemon. Nov 22 11:22:19 datacer pulseaudio[16110]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.
which repeat every 5 seconds, and will rapidly destroy my system.
I've fought with this miserable pulseaudio creation for several years, trying to get sound to work *properly*, but this is the last straw.
Today I held an exorcism and have slain the damned thing: dnf remove pulseaudio which, amazingly, took out 34 packages.
Sound now works perfectly - just the way it should. I cannot discern any important loss of function from the deleted 34 packages so far. aplay, vlc, xmms, mythfrontend and even skypeforlinux all work fine with alsa.
pulseaudio should just go away!
Can you now play a video thru your computer and monitor and local sound speakers and at the same time send an htmi signal to your TV set that includes cideo and sound?
[ ... ]
... and I could give even more examples of how easily a working audio setup with different audio hardware setups is done here on an F26 system with pulseaudio. It just works here. I simply hope that the makers of the system are careful before applying permanent changes to that software.
pulseaudio here: pulseaudio.x86_64 11.1-6.fc26
$ pulseaudio --version pulseaudio 11.1-rebootstrapped
uname -a Linux aw17 4.13.9-200.fc26.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Oct 23 13:52:45 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
fuser -v /dev/snd/* USER PID ACCESS COMMAND /dev/snd/controlC0: [ .... ] 6394 F.... pulseaudio /dev/snd/controlC1: [ .... ] 6394 F.... pulseaudio /dev/snd/controlC2: [ .... ] 6394 F.... pulseaudio /dev/snd/pcmC1D0p: [ .... ] 6394 F...m pulseaudio
lspci | grep -i audio 00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller (rev 06) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05) 01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape Verde/Pitcairn HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 7700/7800 Series]
There are a few things here that do not not behave on the F26 system - pulseaudio doesn't seem to be part of that team ....
Regards Wolfgang
On Thu, 23 Nov 2017 20:02:47 +0100 Wolfgang Pfeiffer roto@gmx.net wrote:
On Wed, 22 Nov 2017 20:10:19 -0500 Doug dmcgarrett@optonline.net wrote:
On 11/22/2017 05:36 PM, David A. De Graaf wrote:
[ ... ]
Today I held an exorcism and have slain the damned thing: dnf remove pulseaudio which, amazingly, took out 34 packages.
Sound now works perfectly - just the way it should. I cannot discern any important loss of function from the deleted 34 packages so far. aplay, vlc, xmms, mythfrontend and even skypeforlinux all work fine with alsa.
pulseaudio should just go away!
Can you now play a video thru your computer and monitor and local sound speakers and at the same time send an htmi signal to your TV set that includes cideo and sound?
... tho I must admit I didn't succeed to have the same audio signal being playbacked on both the internal computer speakers and on external hardware (TV, home stereo etc. ) at the same time ...
I still have to choose: sound either from internal speakers or an external sound system ..
[ ... ]
... and I could give even more examples of how easily a working audio setup with different audio hardware setups is done here on an F26 system with pulseaudio. It just works here. I simply hope that the makers of the system are careful before applying permanent changes to that software. [ ... ]
Allegedly, on or about 22 November 2017, David A. De Graaf sent:
I've fought with this miserable pulseaudio creation for several years, trying to get sound to work *properly*, but this is the last straw.
I can't say I've had any real problems with it. I used to have lots of problems with what was used before pulseaudio, whenever two things wanted to make a sound at the same time, the first one prevented the other, then they might jam each other up when the first thing had finished playing.
I'll ask the obvious question: Do you do fresh installs, or update Fedora over the top of prior installations?
On 11/22/17 21:59, Tim wrote:
Allegedly, on or about 22 November 2017, David A. De Graaf sent:
I've fought with this miserable pulseaudio creation for several years, trying to get sound to work *properly*, but this is the last straw.
I can't say I've had any real problems with it. I used to have lots of problems with what was used before pulseaudio, whenever two things wanted to make a sound at the same time, the first one prevented the other, then they might jam each other up when the first thing had finished playing.
I'll ask the obvious question: Do you do fresh installs, or update Fedora over the top of prior installations?
I ALWAYS do fresh installs. Updates seem a bit risky for my taste. I maintain two root partitions, 1 /home and 1 for /boot/efi. Then I format the older root and freshly install the new Fedora there.
One consequence was that the newly installed pulseaudio-11.1-6.f27 could not be downgraded. So I removed it altogether and found that sound worked just fine.
By fine, I mean, for example, that scripts that generate sound can be invoked by any user, in any environment: In /etc/rc.d/rc.local during boot by root, in a plain text terminal, in an X window by any user, including root, in a crontab job run by any user. Here's a simple example :
*** /usr/local/bin/beep ***
NBEEPS=${1:-10000} REP=`expr $NBEEPS - 1` /bin/play /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/message-new-instant.oga \ gain -0 pad 0 .4 reverb repeat $REP 2> /dev/null
Try it. It ought to work in any of the above situations. But it won't if pulseaudio is in the picture.
The pulseaudio designers know what you want better than you.
On 11/23/2017 08:14 AM, David A. De Graaf wrote:
By fine, I mean, for example, that scripts that generate sound can be invoked by any user, in any environment: In /etc/rc.d/rc.local during boot by root, in a plain text terminal, in an X window by any user, including root, in a crontab job run by any user. Here's a simple example :
I would consider several of those situations to be a security issue and I'm surprised they work even with plain ALSA.
On Thu, 23 Nov 2017 11:14:37 -0500 "David A. De Graaf" dad@datix.us wrote:
By fine, I mean, for example, that scripts that generate sound can be invoked by any user, in any environment: In /etc/rc.d/rc.local during boot by root, in a plain text terminal, in an X window by any user, including root, in a crontab job run by any user. Here's a simple example :
*** /usr/local/bin/beep ***
NBEEPS=${1:-10000} REP=`expr $NBEEPS - 1` /bin/play /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/message-new-instant.oga \ gain -0 pad 0 .4 reverb repeat $REP 2> /dev/null
Try it. It ought to work in any of the above situations. But it won't if pulseaudio is in the picture.
Pulseaudio will never work in that situation; that was a design decision. They felt that that was insecure, since a user's soundstreams could be listened to by other users. I've never tried this, but if you have more than one sound device, you might be able to use pavucontrol to turn off one of them for pulse, leaving it available to alsa only. Then, in an .asoundrc, make that turned off sound device the default device for alsa users who aren't you, so that all sounds go through it. If you set up the other sound device as your default in pulse, it might then allow you to have private audio through pulse, and general audio through alsa. Long shot, but that, or some variation, might work.
Without pulseaudio, I think what you want is the alsa plugin dmix. It provides a simple mix of sounds if more than one source of sound is playing at the same time in alsa.
It's been so long since I wrote any .asoundrc that I can't advise you. But you should be able to find historical .asoundrc samples on the web that do what you want using dmix.
On 11/22/17, David A. De Graaf dad@datix.us wrote:
Sound now works perfectly - just the way it should. I cannot discern any important loss of function from the deleted 34 packages so far. aplay, vlc, xmms, mythfrontend and even skypeforlinux all work fine with alsa.
pulseaudio should just go away!
+1
Where do I sign?. Unfortunately I have a LinuxMINT system w AMD APU and where audio over HDMI never actually worked.
I purchased three cheap USB Sound adapters in the hope of getting audio out that way, but I don't get sound from those either.
I ended up removing pulseaudio but couldn't get alsa to work either, so I now have a sound-less system just like in my AMD 386 running OS/2 back in 1993 before the SoundBlaster 16 arrived.
To paraphrase Midnight Oil lyrics... "Some say that's progrsss, I say that's cruel..."
FC
On 11/23/2017 01:59 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
I ended up removing pulseaudio but couldn't get alsa to work either, so I now have a sound-less system just like in my AMD 386 running OS/2 back in 1993 before the SoundBlaster 16 arrived.
If ALSA isn't working, then PulseAudio won't either since it requires a functioning audio device.
On 11/23/17, Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 11/23/2017 01:59 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
I ended up removing pulseaudio but couldn't get alsa to work either, so I now have a sound-less system just like in my AMD 386 running OS/2 back in 1993 before the SoundBlaster 16 arrived.
If ALSA isn't working, then PulseAudio won't either since it requires a functioning audio device.
Sound originally worked.... on the system's default analog audio output. It was trying to get the audio-over-HDMI part working which messed up the config.
And as far as I know, there isn't a "rebuild this system's audio config" bash script.
Something like HP's HPLIP that scans the hardware at the lowest level and begins configuring everything.
Not to mention the apparent lack of a set-default-audio-device.sh script that allows you to effortlessly change the audio device when there's more than one (eg the built-in-one + an external USB audio device).
If there's something like that, I'd like to know about it. Perhaps this could be a job for the LSB project?
Just thinking aloud... FC
On Thu, 23 Nov 2017 21:04:51 -0300 Fernando Cassia wrote:
If there's something like that, I'd like to know about it.
There is pacmd which has the world's most obscure interface but does allow you to do things like change the output device (once you spend 2 hours decrypting how to use it).
It is in the pulseaudio-utils rpm along with some other command line utilities for doing other things.
About 5 years after pulse was released, it did mostly start to work for me, but it still seems to be solving a problem no one has :-).
On 11/23/2017 07:04 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
On 11/23/17, Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 11/23/2017 01:59 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
I ended up removing pulseaudio but couldn't get alsa to work either, so I now have a sound-less system just like in my AMD 386 running OS/2 back in 1993 before the SoundBlaster 16 arrived.
If ALSA isn't working, then PulseAudio won't either since it requires a functioning audio device.
Sound originally worked.... on the system's default analog audio output. It was trying to get the audio-over-HDMI part working which messed up the config.
And as far as I know, there isn't a "rebuild this system's audio config" bash script.
Something like HP's HPLIP that scans the hardware at the lowest level and begins configuring everything.
Not to mention the apparent lack of a set-default-audio-device.sh script that allows you to effortlessly change the audio device when there's more than one (eg the built-in-one + an external USB audio device).
If there's something like that, I'd like to know about it. Perhaps this could be a job for the LSB project?
Just thinking aloud... FC _______________________________________________
Perhaps I should elaborate: On my system, I have a MB with a sound output. I also have an NVidia video card that also contains a sound decoder with an HDMI output jack. With this combination, AND PulseAudio, I can get simultaneous sound (near the computer with the MOBO sound output) and video on both the local monitor and the TV from the NVidio card, AND sound on the TV from the NVidia card also, via the hdmi connection. It may take some serious fiddling around with the possibilities in PA, but it CAN be done. I cuss out PA, but I don't think any other app can do this. --doug
On Thu, 23 Nov 2017 21:49:17 -0500 Doug wrote:
It may take some serious fiddling around with the possibilities in PA
My most annoying PA experience was it doing something a bit like that all by itself. All I did was apply updates one day, and suddenly only about half the media apps on my system were able to make sound.
After days of trying to figure this out, I finally found that pulse had decided, all by itself, that some apps should be using the analog out and other apps should be using the HDMI output. When I plugged some speakers into the analog out on the computer, the sound for the "silent" apps showed up on those speakers.
Another few days of beating it over the head and using every single sound mixer app I could find to tell it to use the HDMI output for everything and I finally got sound back.
I would not mourn if Doctor Who were to go back in time and distract the pulseaudio developers before they could think of inventing this solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
On Fri, 24 Nov 2017 09:09:07 -0500 Tom Horsley horsley1953@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, 23 Nov 2017 21:49:17 -0500 Doug wrote:
It may take some serious fiddling around with the possibilities in PA
My most annoying PA experience was it doing something a bit like that all by itself. All I did was apply updates one day, and suddenly only about half the media apps on my system were able to make sound.
After days of trying to figure this out, I finally found that pulse had decided, all by itself, that some apps should be using the analog out and other apps should be using the HDMI output. When I plugged some speakers into the analog out on the computer, the sound for the "silent" apps showed up on those speakers.
Another few days of beating it over the head and using every single sound mixer app I could find to tell it to use the HDMI output for everything and I finally got sound back. [ .... ]
With all that trouble : did you try to move the contents of ~/.config/pulse/* to somewhere else, then do something like restart pulse? If yes: did it help?
And I just had a look at the files in /etc/pulse - the editing of these settings seem to be non-trivial, for me at least ...
Regards Wolfgang
On Thu, 23 Nov 2017 18:59:15 -0300 Fernando Cassia fcassia@gmail.com wrote:
Where do I sign?. Unfortunately I have a LinuxMINT system w AMD APU and where audio over HDMI never actually worked.
I purchased three cheap USB Sound adapters in the hope of getting audio out that way, but I don't get sound from those either.
Alsa always makes device 0 the default device in the absence of instructions otherwise. If there is hdmi audio on the video card, it usually takes that position, because video loads before sound, and the digital seems to load before analog.
So, you could have used pavucontrol to set a different default. But you can also do that in an .asoundrc file in your home directory. I've lost the skill of creating those through lack of use, but you should be able to find examples on the web. If you use the plugin dmix, you will even have primitive mixing with alsa.
No need to be without sound anymore.
You can test if any of your devices work, by making sure they are connected to speakers of some sort, and running the command
aplay -D plughw:2,0 [a wav file]
You can find the number to put where the 2 is by running the command
aplay -lv
to see what order alsa put your devices in; it's the card number at the start of the line.
Check that everything is turned on in alsa with
alsamixer -c [card number]