[CONFIGURATION] Another kernel, another pulseaudio restoration

[fredrenner]

Good [Morning .. Evening] Gentlefolks wherever you are,
I foolishly allowed unattended-upgrades (since purged) to exist briefly on this Bionic workstation and it installed a new kernel. Yes, a whole new not-custom-patched, break-anything-that cares kernel. Of course the first thing to die was pulseaudio. The first thing to smell bad is nearly always pulseaudio. My problem is that none of my old rain dances are working to restore it. A user instance is running after being set up by pulseaudio.desktop to execute start-pulseaudio-x11 but nothing seems to reach it. I immediately started looking for a D-Bus problem but got waylaid by a tangle of new snap-related stuff that I thought I was not using.
HP Z800 with 12 cores, 12G RAM, USB 16-bit DAC (Topping TP23) Cleanly installed Bionic a few? months ago with few updates since.

So a brief question: Is there really anything new about the 18.04 pulseaudio configuration beyond some new players? Or can I just chase down the usual suspects?

Also a broader meta-question: Is there a practical way to simplify this system configuration? I do not use virtualization, localization, snaps, Activities, Input Methods, and a number of other code globs. I would prefer not to run them, update them, even see them. My life could be perfectly fulfilling with only a single init system. System startup -- don't even get me started. I design and build robotic equipment; every minute spent on computer administration is a minute not designing/machining/welding/coding/testing.

BTW: programming since 1969, wire-wrapped my first computer in 1977, Linux since 1996, MS-free since 2009.

[GreyGeek]

How about purging the new kernel and locking the previous kernel so it isn't replaced again?

I'm using Btrfs as my root file system. I take a snapshot of my system before any updates. IF things don't work out it takes me about 3 minutes to roll back to that snapshot, or any other. Much easier than putzing around trying to fix things, especially if what I am trying to fix wasn't broken.

[fredrenner]

How about purging the new kernel and locking the previous kernel so it isn't replaced again?

I'm using Btrfs as my root file system. I take a snapshot of my system before any updates. IF things don't work out it takes me about 3 minutes to roll back to that snapshot, or any other. Much easier than putzing around trying to fix things, especially if what I am trying to fix wasn't broken.

I immediately reverted to the old kernel, only to find that it exhibited the same problems. Tried several newer kernels, same problems. That is why I suspect D-Bus or some other glue layer.

Btrfs has been tempting me, mostly from the zeal of adopters like you. I am waiting for the single-click installer/converter that works on clusters!

[GreyGeek]

Are you running your desktop on a cluster?

Currently, the Kubuntu installer has a single click option which gives the entire disk over to EXT4 and a swapfile. But, you CAN convert it:
1: Choose the manual disk partition option
2: Delete all existing partitions
3: Create a single partition: sda1
(Note: Btrfs does not use a swap partition or a swap file but some applications might. You can slice off a partition equal to your RAM size plus 5% or so, thus creating sda1 and sda2, which you assign as a swap partition.
4: Selecting the sda1 partition you left click the down arrow on the dropdown combo box that is showing EXT4 and scroll down to BTRFS.
5: Select / as the partition label.
6: Accept this setting and continue.

When the installation is done you will have Btrfs as your rootfile system. It will contain two subvolumes: @ and @home (/ and /home, as assigned in /etc/fstab)
You're good to go!

I've read about clusters but never worked with or on one.
If all you are referring to is a collection of disks you have some options. One is to add those disks to the rootfile system pool as either a RAID0 or a 3 or 4 disk RAID1. Or, you can do what I did with the three HDs in my laptop: make one my main filesystem and the other two archival Btrfs subvolumes that I mount separately and use btrfs send & receive to send snapshots to them.

[fredrenner]

re: desktop on cluster. Yes but just for a few hungry applications. It doesn't really apply to the pulseaudio problems, just a reinforcement of my aversion to adding administrative tasks.

That problem was indeed due to D-Bus. The various ways for programs to find the user session had been changed to different wrong places. Still puzzles me that going from4.15.0-32-lowlatency to 4.15.0-33-lowlatency should make such a mess.

Marking as Solved.