Comment 9 for bug 315824

The problem has occured again. Everythings looks normal just as before, but sound will not play.

The only new error in any logs related to pulseaudio is this:
/var/log/user.log:Jan 21 14:02:30 ubuntudesktop pulseaudio[27163]: protocol-native.c: Failed to push data into queue

Another weird thing is that running it with the --check command, which should tell me if a running process already exists or not, gives this error:

reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ pulseaudio --check
W: ltdl-bind-now.c: Failed to find original dlopen loader.

But clearly it is running:

reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ ps -A | grep pulseaudio
27163 ? 00:23:14 pulseaudio

So I killed the process with kill -9 and attempted to restart again with the -D option, but I got the same "Failed to find original dlopen loader" message again this time.

So I figure something might be up with alsa.... I checked /var/log for messages from alsa and found this:

/var/log/user.log:Jan 21 23:50:46 ubuntudesktop pulseaudio[32629]: module.c: Failed to load module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: "device_id=0 sink_name=alsa_output.pci_8086_27d8_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0"): initialization failed.
/var/log/user.log.0:Jan 14 07:00:42 ubuntudesktop pulseaudio[6047]: alsa-util.c: Error opening PCM device hw:0: Device or resource busy

This time, the issue was resolved by a force-reload on alsa:

reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ alsa force-reload
mkdir: cannot create directory `/var/run/alsa': Permission denied
/sbin/alsa: Warning: Failed to create /var/run/alsa/.
/sbin/alsa: Warning: Not keeping list of removed modules because /var/run/alsa is absent.
It will not be possible automatically to reload these modules.
Unloading ALSA sound driver modules:/sbin/alsa: 219: cannot create /var/run/alsa/modules-removed: Directory nonexistent
 snd-hda-intel snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm snd-seq-dummy snd-seq-oss snd-seq-midi snd-rawmidi snd-seq-midi-event snd-seq snd-timer snd-seq-device snd-page-alloc.
mkdir: cannot create directory `/var/run/alsa': Permission denied
Loading ALSA sound driver modules: (none to reload).

After that, I have sound again, and alsa started pulseaudio automatically for me (since I was getting an error trying to start it manually this time, I suppose that's good).

THEN.... I noticed pulseaudio stopped on it's own, but I still have sound!?

reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ pulseaudio -D
W: ltdl-bind-now.c: Failed to find original dlopen loader.
E: main.c: daemon startup failed.
reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ ps -A | grep pulseaudio
32629 ? 00:00:00 pulseaudio
reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ pulseaudio -k
W: ltdl-bind-now.c: Failed to find original dlopen loader.
reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ kill -9 32629
bash: kill: (32629) - No such process
reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ ps -A | grep pulseaudio
reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ ps -A | grep pulseaudio
reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ ps -A | grep pulseaudio
reece@ubuntudesktop:~$ pulseaudio -D
W: ltdl-bind-now.c: Failed to find original dlopen loader.

Then starting some music made the pulseaudio process run again, and stay running.

There definitely seems to be some kind of issue between alsa and pulseaudio....