On Thursday 02 August 2018 11:53:49 deloptes wrote: > William Morder wrote: > > However, it seems like pulse is getting forced on us, like it or not. Or > > is this not so? > > It happened many moons ago already. > > youmust know pulse is session based, so it starts with the session. As Mike > Bird said, the home path of the user is missing for some reason. > > You can try creating new user and see if it works there. this will help to > narrow down the problem > > regards > Sorry to vanish in mid-thread; a combination of this ongoing problem, which forces me to reinstall my system every other day, and personal stuff in the real world. Anyway ... if this reads like a novel, I plead not guilty by reason of insanity, or poetic license. I am not a geek, so please bear with me. I did read the other comments; however, my home folder has remained essentially the same through several different operating systems, from the KDE3 desktop with PC Linux in about 2006, through Hardy Heron 8.04 Kubuntu, various KDE3 hacks of Lucid 10.04 and later, attempts at TDE on Ubuntu from 10.04 onwards, until at last Debian Jessie ran pretty well, except for systemd, and I had Devuan running great with no problem. This stuff seems to have come out of nowhere, as I haven't really changed anything in my configuration, except to adapt as necessary, and I haven't changed anything in Debian or Devuan. I had it running for three months or so without touching anything, and now this.... Despite what Mike Bird may believe, I have not changed any permissions in this stuff since 2006. Also I hesitate to post all the items Mike requests, as there is such a thing as too much; however, I may get desperate and submit. Besides, it seems too much for Mike to try to run everything that I have on my system, as I try out a lot of different software, then gradually strip it down to what I need and what works. 1. Having gone into the config folder /home/<USER>/.config/pulse/ I did find a cookie file with rw permissions only. (I assume that this ought to be rw-r-r, am I right?) However, this would not be my doing, as I generally haven't ever used pulseaudio until it was forced on me in Debian; and, as I said, I haven't really changed anything in my config since for ever. Most of my problems with pulse have already disappeared, though, as I purged everything possible that is connected to pulse. There are only two files remaining, both libpulse*-type stuff, and they seem to be necessary, as when I try to remove them, apt wants to uninstall practically everything TDE or Trinity on my system. Anyway, these lines have disappeared in my startup shell: "Failed to create secure directory //.config/pulse so pulse does not seem to be the root cause. However, I just checked top, and even though I have purged everything of pulseaudio, it still runs as a process! 2. Now the plot thickens. Maybe somebody will recognize these details. I purged everything to do with pulse, except for two files which appear to be essential dependencies. Now when I booted up, I got these lines: (EE) Fatal server error Could not create lock file in /tmp/.tXO-lock and tdm [2692] error: X server died during startup X server for display :0 can't be started, session disabled I tried removing the lock file via command-line, and got this; rm: cannot remove 'XO-lock' Read-only file system This seems to be caused by some conflict between Debian and Devuan packages. I tried removing everything systemd, but that caused problems. I installed Devuan packages, and made init my PID 1. I removed systemd-sysv, but didn't do a total purge of systemd stuff, and it ran great, "purring like a kitten" (as I said too quickly), and then this crap. Bill P.S. Running Devuan Jessie on i386 Frankenstein hardware.