[pulseaudio-discuss] Problem in running locally compiled pulse utility programs

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and ssrk at 04/03/11 07:17 did gyre and gimble:
> Hi,
> 
> I run Ubuntu 9.10, which by default has pulseaudio and utilities like
> pactl, pacmd.
> 
> I downloaded pulseaudio source tarball
> http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/pulseaudio/pulseaudio-0.9.22.tar.gz
> and extracted it, ran configure script, compiled it and tried to run the
> locally built pactl utility.
> While running pactl(the one which I built), it gave me "Connection
> failure: Connection refused" Error.
> But the default 'pactl' utility which is already present in /usr/bin/
> works fine.
> 
> $ ./configure --prefix=<tmpdir>
> $ make
> $ make install
> $ cd <tmpdir>
> $ ./bin/pactl stat
> Connection failure: Connection refused
> 
> Can someone tell me, what am I missing?

You have not run the pulseaudio daemon that you compiled. Now in theory,
pactl could try and autospwn a new PA for you but likely that would fail
if you are already running a pulseaudio daemon from your installed
system (typically due to some address already being in use - e.g. the
esd socket).


> Why is the locally built pactl doesn't work? while the default
> /usr/bin/pactl works fine.

Because you are running /usr/bin/pactl against /usr/bin/pulseaudio
daemon in the working case, but with the above example you're running
$prefix/bin/pactl against /usr/bin/pulseaudio.

This should work in most cases but.....

> Are these utility programs coupled to 'pulseaudio' along with which it
> is compiled?

Technically no, but depending on compile options, yes.

If, for example, you do not have udev-devel or dbus-devel installed when
you compile PA, then you will not be using the dbus machine-id to create
a unique runtime directory and will fall back to using a different
runtime path. This means PA will look for it's socket connection in a
different path in the system pactl vs. your own self compiled one.

Run:
PULSE_LOG=99 /usr/bin/pactl stat
 and compare the first couple lines with the same command with your self
compiled one and it should point out where things are going astray.

All the best

Col


-- 

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

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