[pulseaudio-discuss] Service fails on systemctl start. Status always "activating"

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Mon, 2017-05-22 at 15:12 -0700, Karl Stahl wrote:
> Ah!  Sure enough, I had this line in my pulseaudio.service file:
> 
> Requires=pulseaudio.socket
> 
> I copied this file directly from the Debian source:
> https://sources.debian.net/src/pulseaudio/8.0-2/src/daemon/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service.in/
> 
> Debian trunk must be using a newer version of Pulseaudio than
> Raspbian.  It looks like the latest version of Pulseaudio is 10.0.
> Do you know why Raspbian is still using 5.0?

The Raspbian images provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation are based
on the latest Debian stable release, and those stable releases don't
happen often. The current Debian stable release still uses pulseaudio
5.0.

> This is very interesting!  I didn't know that:
>     "Raspbian disables autospawning at every boot by overwriting
> ~/.config/pulse/client.conf"
> I actually had tried setting "autospawn=yes" in
> /etc/pulse/client.conf (isn't this the master version of
> client.conf?), but that seems to have no effect.

If ~/.config/pulse/client.conf exists, /etc/pulse/client.conf won't be
used at all.

> I also don't know how to disable the overwriting of
> ~/.config/pulse/client.conf.

I don't know that either. I'd like to disable it on my rpi too.

> So, now pulseaudio starts at boot, which is fantastic, thank you!
> 
> Alas, I am still having a problem.
> Here's my .service file to start my script.
> 
> # ----------------
> # foo.service
> 
> [Unit]
> Description=Foo
> Requires=pulseaudio.service
> After=network.target pulseaudio.service
> 
> [Service]
> Type=simple
> ExecStart=/home/pi/foo
> Restart=on-failure
> 
> [Install]
> WantedBy=default.target
> # ----------------
> 
> If I start it from the command line, it works just fine, but if I
> enable it to run at boot, it doesn't work, and in the logs I see
> this:
> 
> ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused
> 
> Any ideas?  Maybe a timing issue with the ALSA plugin to interface with Pulseaudio?

No, the alsa plugin is a library that the application loads, not a
thing that needs to be started.

It could be that pulseaudio is not yet fully ready when your script is
started. This is why Type=notify is useful.

Try sleeping in the beginning of your script.

-- 
Tanu

https://www.patreon.com/tanuk