PulseAudio pains

FracPete's World > general > PulseAudio pains

March 22, 2009

general

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Man, I don’t mind if people stick beta-software in Linux distributions – my software is mostly beta as well, but they shouldn’t make is do damn hard to disable features. Trying to get rid of PulseAudio in Ubuntu Intrepid is such a pain!!!

Disabling it in the runlevels and setting the defaults (/etc/default/pulseaudio) didn’t make it go away. After lots of searching the net, I finally came across a useful post with a few more hints.

OK, so here’s the run-down of what I did.

First, the system-wide changes:

  • Disabling PulseAudio in the runlevels
    start up sysv-rc-conf and turn off pulseaudio in all runlevels (if it’s not already installed, you do so with “sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf“):
    sudo sysv-rc-conf
  • Changing the defaults
    Open the defaults for PulseAudio:
    sudo vim /etc/default/pulseaudio
    and change the value for PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START from “1” to “0”.
  • Remove the PulseAudio from the Xsession (moves the file into your home directory – better than deleting it):
    sudo mv /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio ~/

Second, what’s to be done on a per-user basis:

  • Open the frontend for managing your sessions (System -> Preferences -> Sessions) and disable PulseAudio Session Management.
  • Open the gnome configuration editor, either from the menu (Applications -> System Tools -> Configuration Editor) or from the command-line (gconf-editor). Navigate to the setting below and uncheck the active property.
    /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/plugins/sound
  • And just to make sure, I changed the values in the sound preferences (System -> Preferences -> Sound, Devices tab) from Autodetect to ALSA.

If everything went smoothly, you should no longer have to kill the pulseaudio process manually after rebooting your machine and sound will no longer disappear after a while. 🙂