Upgrade 8.04->8.10, sound stops working "device busy"

[Otto Kekäläinen]

I upgraded a pretty clean Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10. After the upgrade the sound stopped working (regression?).

The problem seems to have something to do with Pulseaudio. When I log into Gnome I can hear the startup sound, but after that when I open any application and try to play anything with audio (Rhythmbox, Totem, Kaffeine etc) none of them is able to play any sound. Kaffeine is the only one that gives an proper error: "audio device busy".

I noticed that when I kill the pulseaudio prosess, it automatically spawns back and then sound starts working (until the next time I reboot).

I attached the user.log that seems to contain some error messages from pulseaudio.

I also attached the process lists before and after killing the pulseaudio process. Maybe some process jams pulseaudio..? The diff says:

$ diff processes-before.txt processes-after.txt
98,99d97
< 6198 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --log-target=syslog
< 6202 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/pulseaudio/pulse/gconf-helper
105c103
< 6239 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-trash --spawner :1.4 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/1
---
> 6239 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-trash --spawner :1.4 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/1
119,125d116
< 6799 ? Ss 0:00 kdeinit Running...
< 6804 ? S 0:00 dcopserver [kdeinit] --nosid --suicide
< 6807 ? S 0:00 klauncher [kdeinit] --new-startup
< 6809 ? S 0:00 kded [kdeinit] --new-startup
< 6818 ? S 0:00 kio_file [kdeinit] file /tmp/ksocket-o
< 6900 ? S 0:00 knotify [kdeinit]
< 6903 ? S 0:00 knotify [kdeinit]
128,129c119,121
---
> 7090 ? S 0:03 /usr/bin/artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -s 60 -m artsmessage -l 3 -f

[Otto Kekäläinen (otto)]

Attached list of processes before killing pulseaudio (audio does not work).

[Otto Kekäläinen (otto)]

Attached list of processes after killing pulseaudio (audio starts to work).

[Otto Kekäläinen (otto)]

The issue went away by itself when I run some upgrades yesterday.