PulseAudio doesn't start

[Chris Bredesen]

Roberto Ragusa wrote:
> Chris Bredesen wrote:
>> Jan 28 21:42:18 interlagos pulseaudio[4080]: module-alsa-sink.c: Error
>> opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy
> 
> This means someone else opened the alsa device.
> Try (as root)
>   lsof -n | grep snd
>   lsof -n | grep sound
> 
> Could be that some application not pulseaudio aware or, and that
> happens to me a lot, pulseaudio running as another user.
> If you su to another user in a terminal and run something which
> tries to produce a sound, pulseaudio will try to autorun itself
> as that user, leading an interesting fight between many pulseaudio
> instances attempting to open the same alsa devices.
> 
> This is really annoying as you can not run different applications
> as different users on the same desktop.

This is a laptop and I can't think of any applications off the top of my 
  head that would try to access the alsa device as a different user. 
But I will keep what you said in mind for the next time it bombs.

> It is worse on F10.
> On F9 the second user would try to contact the first pulseaudio
> and get a permission denied, which could be simply solved with
>   chmod 777 -R /tmp/pulse-*
> 
> I have no solution on F10.
> Pulseaudio "cookies" may have to be involved in this scenario, but
> the docs I found were not very assuring.
> 
>> Any clues?  The knock on effect of PA not starting is that Pidgin hangs
>> hard when it tries to make noise.  Other colleagues of mine report this
>> symptom as well...
> 
> Yes, it happens a lot with pidgin.
> And a lot with mplayer too (audio stops randomly and is costantly out of sync).

Thanks for your suggestions - I'll give them a shot.

Cheers,

Chris