If it was my system, I would check the groups of my user to see if he's in the "audio" group and such able to use the audio hardware at all. Then I would check the output of "lspci -vvv" and search for audio hardware, if it's there. Then I woud check "lsmod" if there is the "snd" module and all other needed modules for your audio hardware. Then I would start alsamixer to check if it can access the mixer of your audio hardware. If that is okay and still not works, I would disable pulseaudio autostart by setting "autospawn = off" in client.conf, kill all pulseaudio processes, start it manually with -vvv option and look at the output to see what it tries and where it fails. If that won't work, I would start pulseaudio through strace and search for access to /dev/snd/* devices, to verify it really tried to access it and what this system call will return as exit code. If it was the PC of my neighbor who has no linux administration knowhow, I would suggest to backup all personal files and reinstall, because it should work from scratch. If it fails from scratch, too, then either the linux distribution he uses is flawed, or the audio hardware might be broken and dead. 2013/12/1 James Board <jpboard2 at yahoo.com> > >I guess you may have something already hogging up the ALSA hardware > devices before pulseaudio starts. Perhaps you installed >and activated > jackd or some other audio system. > > > >When pulseaudio starts, it cannot find any free hardware ports to connect > to and falls back to load a null audio sink. > > > >That's just a wild guess, but there are a bazillion of possibilities why > it fails, so I don't have any insights to share with you. > > Well, you know more than me. First question: can I assume this is > causing me to not be able to play sounds? If this the right direction for > me to look? > > I don't know what jackd is and there is no file named jackd on my entire > system. > > Second question: how would I learn why it can't find free hardware ports? > Is there a log file somewhere that tells me what is hogging the ALSA > hardware devices, whatever they are? > > What do I read? What would you do next if this was your system? > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > pulseaudio-discuss mailing list > pulseaudio-discuss at lists.freedesktop.org > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/attachments/20131201/6ceb8121/attachment.html>
