Cannot easily prevent per-user pulseaudio daemon(s) from starting

OK. Not much response yet.

BUT: I figured it out by myself.

dbus-conf starts a script /usr/bin/pulse-session

This starts directly the pulseaudio daemon, thus passing by /etc/default/pulseaudio and /etc/init.d

Changing pulse-session with below lines might help: (or you just start the init.d/pulseaudio script from pulse-session

PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=0
DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=1
test -f /etc/default/pulseaudio && . /etc/default/pulseaudio
test "${PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START}" != "1" && exit 0

Earlier idea messed up gnome startup! Forget that.

I just added the line "/etc/init.d/pulseaudio start" to /usr/bin/pulse-session
and removed the other start line.

This works as expected.

I finally tracked it down to the bottom.

Every X11 startup starts pulseaudio: /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio

1. This seems to be somewhat redundant to /etc/init.d . I am wondering if this could even generate
    problems
2. There is no verification about settings in /etc/default/pulseaudio when started under X11

I think some of the Ubuntu integration guys should have a closer look at it.

Anybody listening?

THX

I had a similar problem that may be related. I first noticed that my sound was not working
after a pulseaudio update. There was a partial workaround to get sound working again here:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/288861

where alsamixer -Dhw revealed that the PCM volume was at zero, and turning it up restored
sound operation. I still have the problem that my system hangs during shutdown while it is
shutting down ALSA. I think that may be because pulseaudio -k does not work, and pulseaudio
is an ALSA client.

Here is a list of similar bugs:

#288861
#288652
#288093
#288039
#286966
#286430
#285965

I can confirm. Also affects startup & shutdown for me. Just filed similar;
bug 290659

I can confirm that /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio does indeed forcibly start pulseaudio when starting a Gnome session. The comments of the file even indicate this was the intent.

This configuration file should respect other settings indicating whether pulseaudio should or should not start. There are at least a few applications that do not work well with pulse audio. These applications however do seem to work fine with alsa dmix. As such alsa dmix is my preferred configuration at this time.

I don't enjoy having to dig through configuration files to override a forced default.

autostarted via /etc/xdg/autostart/

This bug was fixed in the package pulseaudio - 0.9.14-0ubuntu15

---------------
pulseaudio (0.9.14-0ubuntu15) jaunty; urgency=low

  [ Daniel T Chen ]
  * README.Debian:
    pulse-session:
    pulseaudio.default: Clarify function of system-wide check, and
    make /usr/bin/pulse-session do the right thing if system-wide
    is enabled (LP: #286966)

  [ Luke Yelavich ]
  * Make the a11y no start special case per user, not system wide.
  * Also make the esd wrapper script honour system wide pulseaudio.

 -- Luke Yelavich <email address hidden> Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:33:33 +1100