The issue that I am having with pulseaudio seems to be slightly different than I have been able to find, but I think I have an idea how to fix it. I have a dual boot Win7/Ubuntu laptop, HP ProBook 6460b. When I installed Ubuntu, I set a separate partition for the /home folder and had some trouble setting it up to share with the windows partition. In the end, I mounted the new partition at /home/storage/, and set my 'home' folder inside there. This has given me a couple of fits, but has been nominally successful.
I am having an issue with pulseaudio running, as it reports back that it does not have permissions to run in /home; this is true, because that is not where my home folder is located. The result is that I have no means to adjust my audio; I can hear things like videos on firefox, but they come out weakly and from only the left front speaker.
I suspect that I need to modify the location of the pulseaudio conf file, but I'm not sure how to go about that. I've been using ubuntu since 12.04, but mostly as a desktop user- if I type very many commands, they tend to be cut n pasted from instructions.
I have tried a couple things from other threads, and they mostly ended in failures, and none of them ended in fixes. Purging pulseaudio and reinstalling just removed all my system settings options, which forced me to reinstall ubuntu-desktop. Force reloading alsa did not help. I tried adding my user to the 'audio' group, but that didn't change. The last thing I did was install the upgraded hda intel packages from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/UpgradingAlsa/DKMS , also to little avail. I hope someone can steer me in the right direction with this. It appears I may have managed to install ubuntu in a way that breaks functionality that nobody has tried before.
Thanks!