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

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Whit Blauvelt at 10/09/10 15:59 did gyre and gimble:
> 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.

I don't know how the code works as I do not have it to hand. Perhaps the
script always runs but ultimately ends up being a NOOP if some other
configuration parameter is not set (e.g. a /etc/sysconfig/pulseaudio
file with "mode=personal" or "mode=system" etc.). That's probably how
I'd do it if I were writing an init script.

>> "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.

Then pass -vvvv to it to get some debug info. It will then explain why
it doesn't want to run. Chances are you've broken the default.pa.

>> 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? 

If system wide really is in use, then auto-spawning wont work. You'll
know that system wide is in use however as default.pa is not processed
at all as system.pa is used instead. Also the PA daemon itself will be
running under a "pulse" user account, not your local user.

Col



-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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