How do I get pulseaudio to start automatically in Ubuntu 17.04 and 17.10 for Firefox?

Question

I am trying to get Firefox 56.0 on Ubuntu 17.04 and 17.10 to play sound in videos in Facebook (not even sure it is specific to Facebook). I have isolated the problem down to pulseaudio not getting started when I play a video, or just not started at all. But if I execute pulseaudio from the command line, and then play the video from within Facebook, I get sound.

What is confusing me is trying to figure out what I should expect as to exactly when this pulseaudio UNIX process is supposed to be started.

1. At boot time?
2. At X11 startup time prior to user login?
3. At user login (the "greeter" thing; GDM or whatever)?
4. By Firefox when it executes code in some shared library that then demands that pulseaudio be started

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Running/ implies to me that it should be at user login time.

/etc/xdg/autostart is a directory that contains information about session services that graphical session managers should start automatically on user login. PulseAudio ships its own file there. pulseaudio.desktop tells the session manager to run start-pulseaudio-x11, which is a script that loads a few X11 related modules (and on KDE also module-device-manager, which is required by KDE's audio routing configuration tools). start-pulseaudio-x11 is usually the first thing that requires a running PulseAudio server, so usually the server gets started when the session manager runs start-pulseaudio-x11 in the beginning of the login session.

If autospawning is disabled, start-pulseaudio-x11 doesn't have effect, because start-pulseaudio-x11 doesn't start the server explicitly. It relies on autospawning when it loads the X11 modules. In this sense the script name is misleading. The start-pulseaudio-x11 script used to start the server explicitly in the past, which explains the script name.

Commands I've done recently to ensure I am starting from a good baseline, per instructions at http://support.system76.com/articles/audio/ (was done for different reasons, as the front audio connector in my machine was not working and doing the following fixed it):

rm -r ~/.config/pulse
sudo apt install --reinstall alsa-base alsa-utils pulseaudio linux-sound-base libasound2

I am not at the moment thinking that the missing ~/.config/pulse directory is the culprit, but is it?

dmesg | grep pulse

shows nothing, so it is as if something is not even executing the right script at the right time.

What do I need to change to get this enabled? I don't want to manually invoke pulseaudio each time I run firefox (I can kludge something up script-wise, but I don't wanna).

I conclude that autospawn is enabled since it is commented out (assuming commented out means the thing being commented out IS the program's default):

drunkard@norehab:~$ ps -ef --forest --cols=10000 | grep pulse
drunkard    3448  2721  0 14:25 pts/0    00:00:00  |               \_ grep pulse
drunkard@norehab:~$ ls -ld ~/.config/pulse
ls: cannot access '/home/drunkard/.config/pulse': No such file or directory
drunkard@norehab:~$ ls -ld /etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio-kde.desktop
ls: cannot access '/etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio-kde.desktop': No such file or directory
drunkard@norehab:~$ ls -ld /etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4836 Mar 29  2017 /etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop
drunkard@norehab:~$ grep auto /etc/pulse/client.conf
; autospawn = yes
; auto-connect-localhost = no
; auto-connect-display = no
drunkard@norehab:~$ 

UPDATE #1

I tried this:

cp -p /etc/pulse/client.conf ~/.config/pulse/client.conf

And rebooted and it is still not automatically starting.

UPDATE #2

The following proves to me that /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 is NOT getting executed at all:

I saved off /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11:

drunkard@norehab:~$ sudo cp -p /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11.orig

Then added a line at the end that simply writes out the curent timestamp to a log file in /tmp/start-pulseaudio-x11.log:

drunkard@norehab:~$ sudo sh -c 'echo "date >> /tmp/start-pulseaudio-x11.log" >> /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11'
drunkard@norehab:~$ tail /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11

    if [ x"$KDE_FULL_SESSION" = x"true" ]; then
       /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-device-manager "do_routing=1" > /dev/null
    fi

    if [ x"$SESSION_MANAGER" != x ] ; then
      /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-xsmp "display=$DISPLAY session_manager=$SESSION_MANAGER" > /dev/null
    fi
fi
date >> /tmp/start-pulseaudio-x11.log
drunkard@norehab:~$

Then reboot and logged in and found that the /tmp/start-pulseaudio-x11.log was non-existent.

So whatever is supposed to invoke /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 before or after login is not doing so.

UPDATE #3

This is still broken in Ubuntu 17.10. but the comment clued me in that my workaround can use systemctl instead of direct execution.

But I say this is still broken because why is sound not enabled for all users that are using desktops? I mean, under no circumstances that I can think of would I ever NOT want to hear sound from videos played from any browsers. Whatever sound daemon (pulseaudio in this case but it doesn't matter) should be default to "enabled" for desktop users. Not so for server installations, but that is not the case here.

Answer 1

A couple of days ago pulseaudio stopped loading for 18.04 - previously it worked just fine. after looking at all suggestions without permanent results, I just added the following line to the .profile file:

pulseaudio --start

Answer 2

This is a workaround that I'm treating as the answer until someone can identify to me that this is fixed in the upstream Ubuntu installation logic that handles desktop user configuration:

I have a script I run at startup using the Startup Applications shown in this answer: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/32616/21372 , so in that script I added:

# Start pulseaudio because something got broken in Ubuntu or Firefox
# or PulseAudio or or
# or... (https://askubuntu.com/questions/962920/how-do-i-get-pulseaudio-to-start-automatically-in-ubuntu-17-04-for-firefox):
if ! pulseaudio --check
then
  # But not via the old way:
  #
  #   nohup pulseaudio > /dev/null 2>&1 &
  #
  # Use the proper way to enable this at login time per https://askubuntu.com/a/989674/340383
  systemctl --user enable pulseaudio && systemctl --user start pulseaudio
fi

This checks to see if the pulseaudio process is started with the --check option, and if it is not running, start it.

UPDATE #1:

I changed the workaround slightly to use the systemctl commands as indicated in https://askubuntu.com/a/989674/340383

This is still a workaround as Ubuntu should have this enabled by default for desktop users.

I am reasoning that unfortunately I still have to have this workaround in place because the next time I upgrade or install from scratch, and run my new account the first time, if I don't have the above in my startup script, I will hence be baffled as to why sound stopped working.

A counter-argument: Since the systemctl calls will update the ~/.config files thusly (this is from the above systemctl... command line):

Created symlink /home/drunkard/.config/systemd/user/default.target.wants/pulseaudio.service → /usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service.
Created symlink /home/drunkard/.config/systemd/user/sockets.target.wants/pulseaudio.socket → /usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.socket.

then upon the next reinstallation of Ubuntu, then it should just be working properly. But that is only if I kept my ~/.config files which is not a good assumption: I keep all (except for files deep inside ~/.config!) of my "user configuration" files under a Git repository for this very reason of having to workaround usability problems that end up, just like this one, wasting a lot of my time in debugging it down to the root cause, which I don't want to do more than once.