Hi Alan, Sorry for the delay in answering, I'm a bit behind on the list mail. On Thu, 2014-11-13 at 13:48 -0500, Alan McConnell wrote: > Assembled Wisdom! > > When I run pulseaudio --start , I get If you want to run pulseaudio in a console and see the log output, don't give the --start option. The option means that "if pulseaudio isn't yet running, then start it", and it implies that pulseaudio will start in the background. > E: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to truncate cookie file: Invalid argument > W: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to load authorization key '/home/alan/.config/pulse/cookie': Invalid argument > > Which is not a surprise, since all I have in > ~/.config/pulse/ is an empty file, cookie. Which I > created out of desperation<g>. > > Background data: I am running Debian Wheezy -- a new install, on > a new machine -- and I have backported the kernel > vmlinuz-3.16-0.bpo.2-686-pae > and > pulseaudio 4.0 , also backported . > > I conceive it possible that if I can get pulseaudio started, maybe > my sound will work. It worked fine on squeeze, on my old machine . . > ("in a galaxy long ago and far away ") > > Many thanks for any help you can give me in starting pulseaudio. You don't have to create the cookie yourself. PulseAudio will create it if it doesn't exist. What errors do you get when you remove the cookie before starting pulseaudio? The full verbose log may be useful. Put it somewhere online, because the log can be too large for the mailing list. Here are instructions for obtaining the verbose log: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log -- Tanu