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My problem: sound has been working great for 2-3 months until 2 days ago, when I installed some recommended updates. After reboot I've got the following issues:

  • cannot control master volume through GUI
  • volume keyboard buttons doesnt work either

  • volume indicator icon shows 3 dashes:

    indicator icon

  • when I go to sound settings it tells me there is no sound device

  • system sounds don't work (also Thunderbird mail notifications)
  • sound works in many other programs, for example: Banshee, Chrome, Firefox, Skype

If anyone could point me into the right direction, so I could find a solution, I would be very grateful.

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Is Pulseaudio running? You can check that by running pidof pulseaudio from a terminal (if it returns a number then it's running). – RobinJ Jan 20 '12 at 21:47
@RobinJ The command returns nothing. So apparently pulseaudio got knocked out somehow? – Wojtek Jan 20 '12 at 21:59
Ok, run pulseaudio from a terminal, and wait until it starts. While it's running, are you able to play sound? – RobinJ Jan 21 '12 at 12:33
@RobinJ Thanks, when I ran it, it gave me some errors about permissions of some pulseaudio files in /usr/lib. I set the permission to 644 and I'm back in business, so to speak. I appreciate your help. – Wojtek Jan 22 '12 at 13:22

closed as too localized by fossfreedom♦ Feb 8 at 15:44

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1 Answer

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If Pulseaudio isn't running, just run pulseaudio in the terminal and wait for it to start. You might want to make sure this daemon starts at startup, and if it already does, why it crashes during boot.

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