no pulseaudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon

Particularly strange is that when starting X with startx, even as normal user, pulseaudio seems to work but outputs to nowhere, since the sound devices are gone. alsamixer (as user) shows that pulse faked device and simply refused to start as root :ĪLSA lib pulse.c:229: (pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused But at least, on other systems, if pulseaudio doesn't answer - whenever it is the default -, applications (like mplayer) can switch to alsa (or oss on Unix) and use it directly. Adding root to the pulse-access group and running pulseaudio as daemon instead on a per-user basis doesn't help. In fact, I don't know how to use pulseaudio as root. root connection to the sound server is denied. I can access pulseaudio and so have sound while loging in as user from a session manager (xdm or gdm).

Here's what's driving me crazy at the moment: I'm starting to accept the fact that I have no choice but using pulseaudio (but if you hear about a petition to abolish it, please tell me!) You won't like to hear that, but I only have sound issues with openSUSE, never with Unix (all BSDs), nor with other Linux distros. Back to OpenSUSE and back to sound problems.

No pulseaudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon