I've been bitten by this, too, and it cost me four hours to find the root cause - my own user specific config.
It's entirely my fault, because typing 'man pulseaudio', then scroll to the bottom, then type 'man default.pa' would have alerted me early of this problem. Instead I searched the internet high and low which one should always stop if there are hundreds of different by similar issues discussed for different versions of the sound stack. However, maybe I'm not the only one, and maybe we have to help users a bit. My proposal would be to 1. add mention to this fact (user's default.pa replacing the system wide one) in the man page of pulse-cli-syntax right in the first paragraph of the DESCRIPTION, and 2. if no modules are loaded, and debug level of printing is selected, specifically output a message along the lines of 'If no modules are loaded, check if a user specific config replaces the system wide default'. Potentially name the config files. Cheers for an otherwise great sound system :) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to pulseaudio in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/663019 Title: pulseaudio fails to start if ~/.pulse/default.pa exists Status in “pulseaudio” package in Ubuntu: Invalid Bug description: In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick (Linux 2.6.35-22-generic, x86_64) plus ppa :ubuntu-audio-dev/ppa which provides pulseaudio-1:0.9.22~git20100719-0ubuntu1~ppa2 1. Pulseaudio was choosing incorrect default-sink, so I created a very simple file in ~/.pulse/default.pa. It had only two lines, and both lines were initially commented out (I was planning to uncomment them later): # set-default-sink output 1 # set-default-source input 1 When this useless little file exists, pulseaudio fails to start, giving a fatal error: E: main.c: Daemon startup without any loaded modules, refusing to work. I: main.c: Daemon terminated. Why? The error message is really useless because it gives no clue as to the cause of the problem. Maybe the error message could be changed to something more informative related to the cause. It took me a long time to find out why pulseaudio was not starting. Anyway, the answer is: 2. If I move the file out of ~/.pulse/, pulseaudio is able to start normally: $ mv ~/.pulse/default.pa ~/unused-default.pa 3. And if I move the file back again, $ mv ~/unused-default.pa ~/.pulse/default.pa pulseaudio fails to start, giving a fatal error: E: main.c: Daemon startup without any loaded modules, refusing to work. I: main.c: Daemon terminated. : Why? Is it normal? Is it a bug? Thanks for any thoughts. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/663019/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
