On Wed August 1 2018 21:21:32 William Morder wrote:
> Has anybody else had this problem? On reboots I started getting an error
> message in the startup shell (never getting to the login screen):

Assuming that you have shadow passwords enabled please post the output
of "grep root /etc/passwd".

If you don't have shadow passwords please either sanitize the above
output before posting or else post "finger root".

Please repeat the above for the user you are trying to run vlc with.

> "Failed to create secure directory
>
> //.config/pulse

Odd.  Instead of "//" I would have expected a user's home path.

>I searched the forums, tried various solutions, and eventually just purged 
> everything possible that I could find connected to pulse. (I always
> preferred ALSA, anyway.) Some Trinity packages seem to depend on pulse or
> pulse libraries, though, so I wonder if it's possible to get rid of
> everything pulse without breaking my system.
>
> On a side note, I have similar problems with VLC. I cannot actually *use*
> it, as it crashes every time. I have made do with smplayer, which is okay,
> I guess, but I still miss the old VLC. When I try to uninstall or purge
> VLC, however, I find that it would also uninstall practically all my KDE
> and TDE packages.
>
> I don't know if the two are related, but if I am not using them, or they
> cause problems, then I'd like to get rid of them completely.
>
> All help or observations are welcome.

Please post the (sanitized if necessary) output of "grep audio /etc/group"
and of "ls -Rl /dev/snd".

You've made a lot of changes to your system that you've mentioned on this
list including removing packages and (IIRC) clobbering file permissions. 
This makes it hard to diagnose problems with your configuration.

Please post the output of "dpkg -l | cat" and I'll see if it looks
feasible to get any of my test boxes somewhere near your current load.

--Mike