On Wed, 2015-10-07 at 12:21 -0600, Glenn Golden wrote: > The following observations were made on a setup (Arch Linux, x86_64, recently > synched, Arch pulseaudio package 7.0-2) on which the user desires that no > automated launch or respawning of the PA daemon should occur; the user > wishes to start the PA daemon only manually, without any behind the scenes > "assistance". > > The user's client.conf contains only the following lines: > > default-server = > autospawn = no > > First, verify via ps that no PA process is running. Then, from the commandline > as the (non-root) user: > > $ export PULSE_LOG=99 > $ pulseaudio -v -v -v -v -v --start > D: [pulseaudio] caps.c: Cleaning up privileges. > D: [pulseaudio] conf-parser.c: Parsing configuration file \ > '/etc/pulse/daemon.conf' > D: [pulseaudio] conf-parser.c: Parsing configuration file \ > '/home/XXX/.config/pulse/client.conf' > E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed. > > Upon return to the shell prompt, interrogate the exit status: > > $ echo $? > 1 > > Now observe via ps that a PA daemon process is running: > > ... S > > and appears to be behaving normally in all respects. > > At least three things in the above are worthy of head-scratching: > > 1. The error message states "daemon startup failed", yet a pulseaudio > process clearly did start, and appears to be running as a daemon process. > > 2. The '--daemonize=no' shown on the ps line seems wrong, since the PA > process -- which was reported as having failed to start -- is in fact > running as a daemon process. > > 3. The exit status from the startup command is nonzero (failure), yet the > daemon was evidently started successfully. Arch uses systemd's socket activation to start pulseaudio. To prevent automatic starting, I think "systemctl --user disable pulseaudio.socket" should do the trick. The --start option is arguably obsolete on systems that use systemd to manage the pulseaudio daemon, but it would be good if we could make it less confusing. -- Tanu
