Pulse Audio will not start

[dolphin_oracle]

we do start pulseaudio a little differently, and if there is a saved home folder there could be a conflict I suppose.

checking the contents of ~/.config/autostart may lead some clues here.

also, please post the contents of the /etc/fstab. lets make sure the correct ntfs drive is in use.

[wptophat]

Hello wptophat,

And yet Manjaro, Zorin, not Mint have this issue.

Your home directory of Manjaro, Zorin and Mint is NTFS formatted?

many greetings gosia

Yes, the home directory is shared between all of my installed distros.

https://imgur.com/a/XjAAg11

That shows my partition setup while booted into Zorin. sdb2 is my home directory.

[gosia]

Hello wptophat,
Aha, slight confusion of terms. If I see that correctly, what you call Home is not identical to /home. But I think your decision has already been made and I'm going to sleep now. Maybe until tomorrow...

many greetings gosia

[wptophat]

we do start pulseaudio a little differently, and if there is a saved home folder there could be a conflict I suppose.

checking the contents of ~/.config/autostart may lead some clues here.

also, please post the contents of the /etc/fstab. lets make sure the correct ntfs drive is in use.

./config/autostart is empty

ANd here is the content of fstab:

Code: Select all

# Pluggable devices are handled by uDev, they are not in fstab
UUID=998f7f8d-644c-47ae-b2d9-baedc866c5c4 / ext4 defaults,noatime 1 1
UUID=60EFC2AD011ACA5C /home ntfs defaults,noatime 1 2
UUID=f0727ea6-2161-48fe-ae18-ca6c2464e98f swap swap defaults 0 0

[JayM]

Yes, the home directory is shared between all of my installed distros.

There's the problem right there. All of your installed distros are trying to share the same hidden (if it were an ext4 file system) config files and directories even though they may have different versions of Pulse Audio. That face that PA works in the other distros is a miracle and means that you were just lucky up until now.

It's fine to share a common data partition between multiple Linuxes (and Windows), but not /home for that very reason: user- and distro-specific config files get stored there too, and those may or may not be cross-compatible between distros. Your setup was a ticking time bomb that just exploded.

[dolphin_oracle]

can you post the output of "mount" while running MX under that fstab please?

are you able to write to the ntfs home folder when operating under that fstab?

I'm kind of thinking to change the ntfs to ntfs-3g in your fstab config and see if that helps (reboot will be required).

[sunrat]

...

Code: Select all

# Pluggable devices are handled by uDev, they are not in fstab
UUID=998f7f8d-644c-47ae-b2d9-baedc866c5c4 / ext4 defaults,noatime 1 1
UUID=60EFC2AD011ACA5C /home ntfs defaults,noatime 1 2
UUID=f0727ea6-2161-48fe-ae18-ca6c2464e98f swap swap defaults 0 0

For an ntfs partition, try specifying ownership in fstab:

Code: Select all

UUID=60EFC2AD011ACA5C /home ntfs defaults,noatime,uid=1000,gid=1000 1 2

I'm kind of thinking to change the ntfs to ntfs-3g in your fstab config and see if that helps (reboot will be required).

I believe ntfs is a symlink to ntfs-3g these days. Not in MX atm but I'd guess is the same:

Code: Select all

$ file /sbin/mount.ntfs
/sbin/mount.ntfs: symbolic link to mount.ntfs-3g

I agree with JayM, /home should not be shared between distros because of possible issues like this. I treat /home as a scratch pad for current working files and downloads and move them to a separate /data partition when finished.

[nik.gnomic]

sudo start-pulseaudio-x11

should not run Pulseaudio as root with a DE(except for some headless systems) - What Is Wrong With System mode

start-pulseaudio-x11 will not work to start pulseaudio.service MX is not using systemd in the same way as Manjaro

Based on advice from another forum (Stack), I deleted the default.pa file

if it is custom configuration from another OS deleting ~/.config/pulse/default.pa may be good idea
deleting most, possibly all, of the files in that folder would allow a restarted Pulseaudio to correctly create new MX user configuration
(but will likely cause problems for Pulseaudio on one or more of other OS using shared home)

but if you deleted MX system configuration /etc/pulse/default.pa would not be able to start Pulseaudio