How can I cleanly remove PulseAudio in Ubuntu 14.04?

I am having sound issues in Ubuntu 14, mostly underruns causing skips and ugly noises and I want to remove pulse audio in an attempt to debug.

But when I do this breaks system settings in ubuntu. Fixing this by installing 'ubuntu-desktop' or 'unity' result in pulse being reinstalled.

I have blacklisted a few drivers I'm not using with not positive or negative effect. I have also tried removing pulse and removing the ~/.pulse folder before reinstalling.

Any help appreciated.

7

3 Answers

You can't remove Pulseaudio in Ubuntu 14.04 without breaking some dependencies. The sound indicator and the sound options panel, even the control center itself, are dependent on Pulseaudio.

Pulseaudio is just a userspace daemon. But you can't simple kill Pulseaudio since it will be respawned by the init system.

jorge@den:~$ ps aux | grep pulseaudio
jorge 3797 0.0 0.1 440464 7360 ? S<l 17:40 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
jorge 3803 0.0 0.0 98392 3028 ? S 17:40 0:00 /usr/lib/pulseaudio/pulse/gconf-helper
jorge 4057 0.0 0.0 23900 924 pts/0 S+ 17:51 0:00 grep --color=auto pulseaudio
jorge@den:~$ pkill -f pulseaudio
jorge@den:~$ ps aux | grep pulseaudio
jorge 4063 6.0 0.1 440680 7236 ? S<l 17:51 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
jorge 4067 0.0 0.0 98392 3028 ? S 17:51 0:00 /usr/lib/pulseaudio/pulse/gconf-helper
jorge 4069 0.0 0.0 23900 924 pts/0 S+ 17:51 0:00 grep --color=auto pulseaudio

You can tell Pulseaudio not to respawn itself by issuing this command:

echo "autospawn = no" > $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf

You can now kill pulseaudio:

jorge@den:~$ pkill -f pulseaudio
jorge@den:~$ ps aux | grep pulse
jorge 6310 0.0 0.0 23900 916 pts/1 S+ 18:11 0:00 grep --color=auto pulse

Pulseaudio should be restarted on session startup, but it might be terminated if there is no sound activity, so after you are done, remember to remove the file you have created before, so Pulseaudio can be respawned when needed.

rm $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf

3

You can easily remove pulseaudio with apt-get:

apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio

or with apt:

apt purge pulseaudio

5

The above answer is a good solution. To ease the process one could put it in a practical script. For example:

echo autospawn = no > $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf
pulseaudio --kill
read -p "Press enter to enable pulseaudio again."
rm $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf
pulseaudio --start

I didn't think of it, merely adapted it. This script works for me in Ubuntu 16.04.

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