Ubuntu 10.04 Tip: How to fix Waiting for sound system to respond problem

There is already a startup entry titled “PulseAudio Sound System”. The associated command is “start-pulseaudio-x11”. For people who do not login as root, does this do something different?

Are you experiencing issues with the sound system or just missing the sound applet? Check if Gnome Volume Control applet is included in the System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications. It is called “Volume Control” If not add it:

Name: Volume Control
Command: gnome-volume-control-applet

After that, in either case, press alt+f2 type:

gnome-volume-control-applet

nothing happens when i do: gnome-volume-control-applet

Whatever I do I get the sound system waiting warning. I even purged, and reinstalled pulse audio, nothing. I also deleted the .pulse folder in /home – nada nada… anything I should try before re-installing ubuntu? 🙁

cheers!

To all of you wussy users out that tell me not to run as root, you do what you want on your system, let “real men” do what we want on ours. sudo for wimps! 😉

Joe,
Running the desktop is not only unnecessary but unsecure. Running browsers and chat clients is particularly foolhardy. If a site you view has a malicious code or applet in it then it will inherit the access of the user launching the browser (root) and will be able to access the stuff it can to cause terror / duplicate / email forward etc. If yuo do this as a user then the app will only have write access to the users home directory and damage is minimised to the home directory. This is one reason why Windows users get so many problems, the default user model is Admin so thatt dumb users don’t have to sweat access rights. This does however mean that any virus in email / via jave / via flash can reek havok on the system as it has full access.

root is also common on ALL UNIX systems, this is the first account an attacker will try to gain access to your system. If you have root enabled then the attacker must only guess the password, if it is disabled, the chance of guessing the password is 0% as the account is disabled. Using only usernames the attacker must also guess a valid username which could be ANYTHING at all and therefore more secure.

Disabling root is just smart, it’s not about “being men” , its about keeping possible issue to a minimum. Having to type sudo for a small few commands fails into insignificance considering the extra security it gives the system.

Idiots use root, smart people use sudo

@Joe, I believe that it was Arnold Schwarzenegger that said “Real men run as root”, possibly in Terminator 4: Rise of the Windows.

this fix its a good one it work for me 🙂 actualy its the same sound mixer from 9.10 but 🙂 still worked
i have virtual box with winxp and i kind of like watching movies with subtitles under the ost and it sounded low . so now its high

This works but then Skype is borked…”pulse audio server- local” is the only option in skype, all of the other options that were there are gone….any suggestions?

That works!! Thank you! 😀

I had this problem. Was solved by installing pulseaudio (I do not know why it was not installed, the volume controls were working fine. I guess it was removed by accident)

Used Code:
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio

and then followed the instruction posted above, but instead of entering the command:

/usr/bin/pulseaudio

I used:

start-pulseaudio-x11

because this was the original command in the “Startup programs”

Deleting (rm -fr) the .pulse directory in my home directory and restarting Ubuntu fixed it for me. I think my .pulse directory had gotten corrupted somehow.

Thx It works for me

I had the same problem (no volume applet) and discovered a bug in my /etc/pulse/daemon.conf that I had recently edited to remove ratelimit.c notices in /var/log/messages

I changed ‘log-level = normal’ to ‘log-level = error’ (line 49) and `/usr/bin/pulseaudio –start` worked – I now have a volume applet.

Thanks for the hints, folk!

same thing with backtrack5 on my netbook lol

reinstalling pulseaudio helped me