Configuring pulseaudio startup

Rocky Linux General
1

On one of my systems (Rocky 8.7, running on bare iron), pulseaudio seems to be starting as a system daemon, since pacmd complains, “No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as a session daemon.” There is a pulseaudio process running, (/usr/bin/oulseaudio --daemonize=no --log-target=journal) though apparently not as a systemd service, as there is no service by that name. In order to make sound work, I have to set it up from the Sound GUI each time I log in. On a Rocky 8.7 VM, I don’t have these problems.

I suspect that the bare iron machine’s problem stem from the motherboard’s built-in sound (Alder Lake-S) not being supported by the kernel, so I have to use a separate sound card. What file do I need to edit to set up the sound configuration?

2

Should be running as a systemd “user” service, try the following

systemctl --user status pulseaudio

The problem I had was that the mixer settings were not being saved and I had to use
alsactl store
to make them persistent.

3

Thanks – much appreciated. What I didn’t know about was running systemctl with “–user” and doing that as the logged-in user. Trying to run “systemctl status pulseaudio” as “root” just results in “Unit pulseaudio.service could not be found.”

I’ve got things working now. Thanks again.