It seems that pulseaudio is failing to read my configuration files, or something is overriding it with settings from elsewhere.
As an example, I can’t disable autospawn:
fa2k@blackhole:~$ grep autospawn /etc/pulse/client.conf
autospawn = no
fa2k@blackhole:~$ ls -l /etc/pulse/client.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1198 mai 21 15:01 /etc/pulse/client.conf
fa2k@blackhole:~$ ls -l .config/pulse
total 7
-rw------- 1 fa2k ateam 256 mai 21 15:06 cookie
When I run pulseaudio -k, it still comes back immediately.
I’ve tried to copy over files from /etc/pulse/ into my user’s configuration directory, but it doesn’t change anything.
The following is output in the journal when I try to kill pulseaudio
mai 21 15:06:19 blackhole systemd[3979]: pulseaudio.service: Succeeded.
mai 21 15:06:19 blackhole systemd[3979]: Starting Sound Service...
mai 21 15:06:23 blackhole pulseaudio[400784]: module-combine is deprecated: Please use module-combine-sink instead of module-combine!
mai 21 15:06:23 blackhole pulseaudio[400784]: We will now load module-combine-sink. Please make sure to remove module-combine from your configuration.
mai 21 15:06:23 blackhole pulseaudio[400784]: Failed to open module module-esound-protocol-tcp.so: module-esound-protocol-tcp.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
mai 21 15:06:23 blackhole pulseaudio[400784]: Failed to open module "module-esound-protocol-tcp".
mai 21 15:06:23 blackhole pulseaudio[400784]: pa_module_load() failed
mai 21 15:06:23 blackhole systemd[3979]: Started Sound Service.
mai 21 15:06:24 blackhole gsd-media-keys[391890]: Unable to get default sink
mai 21 15:06:24 blackhole gsd-media-keys[391890]: gvc_mixer_card_get_index: assertion 'GVC_IS_MIXER_CARD (card)' failed
mai 21 15:06:24 blackhole gnome-shell[391705]: gvc_mixer_card_get_index: assertion 'GVC_IS_MIXER_CARD (card)' failed
mai 21 15:06:56 blackhole gnome-shell[391705]: Source ID 18491 was not found when attempting to remove it
mai 21 15:07:27 blackhole gnome-shell[391705]: Source ID 18725 was not found when attempting to remove it
The error about module-combine seems like something I’ve tried years ago, to combine some outputs. Now there’s nothing about module-combine in /etc/pulse or ~/.config/pulse. I’ve started a search in my entire home dir to look for that string.
Seems to me that some old configuration file is overriding my attempts to set autospawn, and also bringing in a module-combine command (that’s not a default thing in Ubuntu, right?).
It could have been like this before the upgrade, but I notice now because one of my sound cards is missing from pulse, but not from ALSA — the one I actually use.