I have a computer that runs Mythbuntu 12.04. It has an external USB Kenwood Digital Audio device.
When I open up pavucontrol, I get this message:
If I do as the message suggests and run start-pulseaudio-x11, I get this output:
$ start-pulseaudio-x11
Connection failure: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused
Error log file, created with these intructions, on Pastebin.
How do I correct this error?
The solution to this problem was discovered in the course of solving my other problem, with Pulseaudio and Flash.
First I needed to completely purge and reinstall Pulseaudio. One way to do this is to run the command:
sudo apt-get --purge --reinstall install pulseaudio
Then, after I had a clean start, I discovered there was this odd entry in /etc/pulse/client.conf. It had a line that said:
autospawn = now
It seems that now is not a valid option. I have no idea where that option was coming from, as I thought I was starting fresh after reinstalling.
I changed it to yes, and then commented it out as well anyway.
; autospawn = yes
Rebooted, and then I was able open pavucontrol without errors.
The lesson I took from this is that purging an application might not be as complete as one would assume it to be.
Try this:
rm -r ~/.pulse
rm -r ~/.pulse-cookie
rm -r ~/.config/pulse
There might be errors reported that files could not be found. That's ok. Then we kick pulse and start it again:
sudo pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio --start
There, too, errors might be reported like:
E: [pulseaudio] core-util.c: Home directory not accessible: Keine Berechtigung
W: [autospawn] lock-autospawn.c: Fehler beim Zugriff auf Autostart-Sperre.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to acquire autospawn lock
But after a reboot, it worked for me. Pavucontrol is again running fine since then.
I'm assuming you've tried deleting ~/.pulse/* and restarting the sound server?
Your second option is to check /etc/pulse/client.conf in /etc/pulse, as suggested in the warning. Make sure everything is set to its default value by commenting out every line with a leading semicolon.
Finally, it could be related to this bug. The work-around here was to start pulseaudio in system mode, by changing the value of PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START in /etc/default/pulseaudio to 1. This will prevent pulseaudio from loading 'default.pa' in your /etc/pulse folder. If this fixes your problem and you are on a multi-user system so don't want to continue running pulse in system mode, then edit your post with the contents of default.pa. Otherwise, just leave it fixed. I don't really see the problem with running it in system mode on a single-user system.
I received this "Connection to PulseAudio failed" error when there were different values of the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable.
The pulseaudio server was running with one value, and pavucontrol was running with a different value. Consequently, pavucontrol was looking in the wrong directory for the communication socket created by pulseaudio.
In this case, the solution is to make sure both processes have the same value for the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable.
Open etc/pulse/default.pa and try commenting out all these lines:
.ifexists module-jackdbus-detect.so
load-module module-jackdbus-detect
.endif
Run the steps again and check the log for changes, if possible give use another output.
If that does not work remove pulseaudio and reboot.
For me on Ubuntu 24.10 this is the solution [ChatGPT, mpb]:
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.config
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u)
I recently had this on an old gentoo computer I was upgrading. It turns out I had failed to start the dbus service
# /etc/init.d/dbus start
# rc-update add dbus default
This will probably be an unusual cause of that error dialog.
