[SOLVED] FC12: PulseAudio volume works at runLevel5 using GDM; But doesnt at rLevel 3

[nyceyes]

Friends:

Apologies in advance for this thorough post, as it is meant to walk you
through my issue, and elicit some answers. Thanks in advance.

For a variety of reasons I like to run my Unix systems tight. In the case of
Linux FedoraCore-12, I boot to Run-level-3, and simply type "exec xinit",
which uses a correspondingly lean "~/.xinitrc" file to start X and my (also
lightweight) "IceWM" window manager.

After the windowing interface completes loading, among the processes
now running, are the following Sound/Volume control and audio playing
related daemons (as the local non-root user):

/usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
/usr/libexec/pulse/gconf-helper
/usr/libexec/gconfd-2

Unfortunately, when I click on the PulseAudio Volume Control applet
(or even the gnome-volume applet), it's doesn't always see my
SoundBlaster Audigy4 card; yet sometimes it does (after stopping and
restarting the daemons manually). But even when it does
identify the card (where it shows SoundBlaster4 instead of showing the
default "Dummy Output: Stereo" card), I get no audio output from any
audio player (totem, firefox, mplayer, etc.).... *except* for once
or twice in many tries, could I get it to work (by stopping and restarting
/usr/bin/pulseaudio). It's hard to reproduce.

Now it doesn't seem to be a sound driver issue because, as I just said, I've
gotten sound to work a couple of times. And also, when I boot to init
(run) level 5 and log in via the GDM interface, the same PulseAudio and
Gnome-volume volume control applets, always successfully show my SB4
card, and all applications can play audio just fine.

Of course the GDM environment has a thousand more gnome type
daemons running than my lean IceWM environment does (which is why I don't
use run level 5/GDM), but none of those additional daemons seem essential
to sound and volume. Why do I say this?

... because, as I said above, in my IceWM environment, every once in a while
stopping and restarting the pulseaudio daemon (pulseaudio -k; then
pulseaudio --start), gets things to work. Moreover, before I upgraded from
FedoraCore-10 to FedoraCore-12, I had no problems whatsoever with
my sound card/volume when running simple xinit/IceWM... the same three
daemons above ran, and it worked perfectly.

Any thoughts?

Is it a sequencing/timing/race-condition problem when starting X via xinit
and then starting the pulseaudio daemon?

Is there a pulseaudio related Unix domain socket that needs to be
cleaned up before starting?

Again on FC10, xinit/X/IceWM this was no problem at all.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance,
Noel

[nyceyes]

Thanks for the overwhelming response.

It took me installing OpenSUSE 11.2 on the same machine, experiencing
the exact same problem, and then reading their forums to find that the
simple solution to the below problem, was to add myself (my unix user name)
to the "audio" group (in /etc/group). This works for me since I am the only
user of this computer. It would not be appropriate for multi-user environment.

Recall that I'm running simple IceWM at run-level-3 and not GNOME, or KDE, or
GDM in run-level-5. Thusly, I don't run the many GNOME/GDM based
processes you get when booting into run-level-5. In other words,...
presumably, among the many processes started when you enter run-level-5
and run a FAT window manager (like GNOME), probable one or two
of them proxy authenticate you to access the audio device files in "/dev/snd"
directory.

Summary: When running IceWM (or another light window manager) from
run-level-3, append your unix user name to "audio" group in "/etc/group"
(at least as of Fedora 12, and perhaps FC11 too. FC10 didn't need that).

Hope this helps someone.