[pulseaudio-discuss] Using "expect" to feed pacmd

[Whit Blauvelt]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 03:41:17PM +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote:

> I believe they just provide the script. They certainly do not use it by
> default and in a typical setup it is not activated by default. 99% of
> their users they will totally ignore this script and it will not be run.

I'm typing this now on a laptop running pretty much a virgin install of
Ubuntu 10.04 and /etc/init.d/pulseaudio is set to run by default. I'll try
disabling that later and see what happens. It's possible I enabled that for
default without remembering, but the default behavior of apt-get when
installing a package which provides an init script is to turn the init
script on. Maybe the other package managers have a different default.

> "pulseaudio&" will just try to run PA and when it detects one is already
> running it exits.

Ah, but when one _isn't_ running it just exits too. That's the problem. It
doesn't indicate why it's failing either.

> Generally speaking PA will then just automatically start again due to
> it's auto-spawn capabilities.

Wonder why that's not happening then. Wish it were leaving clues about the
failure. Maybe starting system-wide meant it wouldn't start even once for
the user, so won't respawn? 

> That said, after killing PA, you should generally run start-pulseaudio-x11
> script again (it's done automatically at login for you) to ensure the
> correct X11 related modules are loaded into PA.

I'll try that. 

Thanks,
Whit