No welcome/login sound on Ubuntu desktop

[Dave Jones]

Under the Ubuntu desktop for Raspberry Pi, for several recent releases, the startup sound from the Yaru sound theme has failed to play both at the initial setup (from oem-config, where it used to play just before language selection), and at the greeter.

This worked in Jammy (22.04), but on at least mantic (23.10) and the forthcoming noble (24.04) (and possibly earlier), this has failed. It's not due to a crash in canberra-gtk-play (used to play the sound). The only hint that something has failed appears in the oem-config.log:

  Failed to play sound: Not available

Unfortunately there's nothing else in the log that hints at why canberra-gtk-play is failing.

There are several similar bug report, but I doubt they are related given their age (e.g. LP: #1002114 relates to ubuntu 12.04 which had a very different sound stack and predates the preinstalled desktop images).

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/2060693

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

recent discussion out-of-band suggested this might have been a rpi-specific failure, is that accurate?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

If it's specific to raspi is it maybe the same problem than bug #2063255?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.