Comment 18 for bug 570015

On Wed, 05 May 2010 12:53:04 -0000, Dražen Kačar <email address hidden> wrote:
> Ah, got it. Pulseaudio won't start (under my user's account) because of:
>
> E: module.c: Failed to load module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: "device=plughw:0 rate=44100"): initialization failed.
> E: main.c: Module load failed.
> E: main.c: Failed to initialize daemon.
>
> And that module was specified in ~/.pulse/default.pa, which is a
> leftover from the time when pulseaudio wasn't working and I was trying
> to do something about it.
>
> So I deleted ~/.pulse/default.pa, stopped pulseaudio that was started by
> hand and polkitd is still behaving perfectly fine. Even the music is
> playing, although I have no pulseaudio running. :-)
>
> Then I killed polkitd and it wasn't restarted. So I started pulseudio by
> hand (from my user's account) and then polkitd appeared. It's peacefully
> sleeping in poll() and isn't leaking memory.

Great, thanks for the info.

Could you confirm that you have

  /usr/lib/pulse-0.9.21/modules/module-alsa-sink.so

installed?

My guess is that "device=plughw:0 rate=44100" is no longer valid on your
system, probably the device=plughw:0 bit, which means that the module
can't load.

I'm going to reassign this to pulseaudio, as it's a poor failure mode.

To the other people subscribed to this bug, please do the same
diagnostic steps that I posted before. If you see these same messages
then you have this bug, if not, please file a new bug against pulseaudio
wiht the output you get when doing the steps (you could use "ubuntu-bug
pulseaudio" to grab a bunch of logs too).

Thanks,

James