PulseAudio, at least as built and installed in Portage, is unable to start if ConsoleKit is not installed ("-consolekit" in make.conf USE.) Yet the PA ebuild does not pull CK as a dependency.
Attach verbose log of such aborted start. Are you sure that i.e. adding the user to 'audio' group doesn't help ?
User "pulse" is in the following groups: audio plugdev pulse pulseaudio has been emerged with following USE flags: "X alsa asyncns caps dbus glib libsamplerate (multilib) tcpd udev -avahi -bluetooth -doc -gnome -hal -ipv6 -jack -lirc (-oss) -realtime (-system-wide) -test" Re-emerging with "hal" enabled and/or "udev" disabled does not change anything. This is the error message with which the pulseaudio daemon aborts when trying to start without consolekit: E: module-console-kit.c: GetSessionsForUnixUser() call failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "GetSessionsForUnixUser" with signature "u" on interface "org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager" doesn't exist E: module.c: Failed to load module "module-console-kit" (argument: ""): initialization failed. E: main.c: Module load failed. E: main.c: Failed to initialize daemon.
Not user 'pulse', your user. But anyway, that's more a configuration problem - if you comment out that module in default.pa things should be alright. main pulseaudio developer is AFAIK a RedHat employee and a Gnome user, so pulseaudio works out-of-box on full Gnome installs with gdm and all of its dependencies (dbus, consolekit, etc.). If you try to leave some stuff out, you need to adjust config files.
I didn't know anything about PA modules. I've found out that there's a module called "module-console-kit" and that PA loads modules in /etc/pulse/default.pa. The console-kit module is loaded by this file by default. I think the PA ebuild might want to have a "consolekit" USE flag so that the module will not be used (or built, if that's possible) if consolekit is missing. This makes sense because there are USE flags for hal, udev, dbus, etc, just not for consolekit.
The catch is that, AFAICT, those that you've mentioned are real runtime deps - that is i.e. they provide libs, pulseaudio links against, while that consolekit module depends only on dbus and simply calls ConsoleKit services through it.
Is this intended behavior and should I close this?
I think a on-by-default consolekit USE flag is fine. We can make the behaviour similar to the avahi module where the corresponding config line is commented out if the USE flag is not set. Nikos, for now you could just comment that line, and if there are no objections, we can do this for the next release (no point in making everyone recompile their PulseAudio for a trivial change).
I'm no longer interested in this bug. I have completely removed PulseAudio from my system for a long time now.
*** Bug 234479 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 424898 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 478206 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Just wondering: why is this bug still open? :-P
It starts ok for me even without consolekit with 4.99.4
I assume the TEST-REQUEST is targeted at me. As I said, this bug is not relevant to me anymore.
I wonder if I might request that this bug be reopened. I just purged *kit from my system, and I immediately hit this issue with pulseaudio-6.0 (mostly-stable amd64 system). $ pulseaudio W: [pulseaudio] main.c: Compiled with DEPRECATED libsamplerate support! E: [pulseaudio] module-console-kit.c: GetSessionsForUnixUser() call failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit was not provided by any .service files E: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-console-kit" (argument: ""): initialization failed. E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Module load failed. E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to initialize daemon. $ My user is in the audio group. Can we please add a consolekit USE flag to control building module-console-kit.so?