[pulseaudio-discuss] Weird bug with Pulseaudio connections.

[Robbie Smith]

Hello everyone

I haven't posted to this list before, not being much of a developer, but
I've been having some really odd bugs pop up almost at random with
Pulseaudio. Usually they disappear days or weeks later with just as much
warning as when they occur, and I'm never sure whether I've solved them
or whether my computer is just ... odd.

Anyway, the main nature of the bugs is that Pulseaudio seems to have
difficulty connecting to either ALSA, my sound card, or something else.
I can't quite explain what's going on; I've tried reading
through /var/log/errors.log and noticed that it is "failing to set
hardware parameters with a connection timeout". I'm not quite familiar
with how Pulseaudio works, but from the odd arcane messages I get, I'm
guessing that somewhere, somehow, it's trying to talk to my soundcard
and my soundcard is responding with "Computer says no."

The weird bit is that the "bug", if that's what it is, gets triggered by
almost anything. Commonly, opening pavucontrol will kill sound for a few
seconds to a few minutes: sound only resumes once I've killed
pavucontrol, and a dialog/error box will pop up alerting me to a
connection timeout. Given that pavucontrol is a really useful way of
manipulating the volume of individual programs this can be quite
annoying.

Before I describe what methods I've attempted to solve the problems,
I'll just briefly list my OS. I'm currently running Arch Linux, with (as
of tonight) the latest (stable) kernel 2.6.38.2 according to my update
logs. Pulseaudio itself is version 0.9.22. My desktop "environment" is
Openbox, and I'm calling it within consolekit and polkit and whatever
else it needs.

        The command being called from ~/.xinitrc is
        exec /usr/bin/ck-launch-session /usr/bin/openbox-session
        
        start-pulseaudio-x11 is also being called in this file, a few
        lines up.


As for setting up my system, I think I've tried just about every guide
there is, and there's a lot of conflicting information out there,
especially on user and group permissions. Sometimes following a guide
for the sake of it fixes the bug; that being said, I've already had the
settings it recommends so I have no idea what's going on.

I've experimented with setting sinks, with setting sound outputs,
everything. But time and again this weird bug shows up, pulseaudio fails
to load, or the pavucontrol applet brings the sound to a halt, or
something. And without warning it'll start working again, usually within
hours of me asking on a forum somewhere about the bug. 

As far as I know I've installed everything that might be needed. I used
to like Pulseaudio, the whole control-volume-of-individual-streams is
great. But it just doesn't work (between some of the time to most of the
time). And yet it's one of those features, which once you get used to
it, is really hard to live without.

How can I fix this once and for all? If there's any configuration
details or similar that you might need to be able to confirm or identify
the bug or whatever conditions are causing this, let me know what you
need to know and I'll try to assist in any way I can.

regards
Robbie