Mysteries of pulseaudio

[Eric Brunson]

Craig White wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-08-23 at 13:10 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>   
>> Sound is working fine for me
>> on my Fedora-9 Thinkpad T43,
>> but when I boot I get the message
>> that pulseaudio is not working,
>> and sound is reverting to (I think) ac97.
>>
>> I see in /var/log/messages the messages
>> Aug 23 10:22:46 carrie pulseaudio[2317]: 
>>         pid.c: Daemon already running.
>> Aug 23 10:22:46 carrie pulseaudio[2317]: 
>>         main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed.
>> However, pulseaudio daemon does not appear to be running now.
>>
>> This seems to be a purely academic question,
>> but I'd be interested to know
>> (a) why pulseaudio is not running, and
>> (b) whether this matters?
>>     
> ----
> a - as user, does ps aux|grep pulse show any pulse process running?
>
> b - as user, does 'pulseaudio -D' help?
>
> Craig
>
>   

I spent an hour or two trying to narrow down what's wrong on my system 
this morning.

Everything works fine under the 2.6.25-14 kernel I'm running now, but 
when I boot into the 2.6.26.3-29 kernel, while changing nothing else, I 
get the same log messages that you do and the pulseaudio server will not 
start either as myself or as root.

I've tried disabling selinux (always one of the first things I test) but 
that didn't help.  Booting back into 2.6.25-14 fixes everything again.

Any other suggestions for me to try?