Hello all,

I am posting this message here after also having posted it on Arch Linux' forums. Unfortunately, there has not been any reply or solution found until now.

My computer is currently running Arch (with OpenRC, not systemd) and KDE Plasma 5. My laptop is an Asus A55E (Intel Core i7 Sandybridge with audio controller Intel 6 Series C200).

I noticed an issue with applet plasma-pa to control the volume of my sound card. It generally works perfectly, except if I logout and log back into KDE. The speaker icon shows a red minus sign. Clicking on it, I see no device (neither input nor output). As a consequence, I am unable to control the volume using the KDE applet.

In a terminal, running alsamixer definitely shows that pulseaudio is running OK. Moreover, any application using pulse as output can play sounds without any issues (VLC, SMPlayer, qmmp...). Finally, utility pavucontrol shows the applications using PulseAudio.

To sum up, all of my applications but plasma-pa work fine after logging out and logging back in.

Killing pulseaudio and restarting it do not solve the issue.

The only workaround I have found until now is to restart the computer completely. Only then plasma-pa runs OK and shows the input/output and running applications.

Please, has anyone noticed that issue with plasma-pa after logout/relogin? If so, what should be done to have plasma-pa running properly?

All the best!

Chris

hm, not sure if this is actually not a plasma issue rather than a multimedia one, as we do not cater for the plasma applet.

Hello,

Thank you for your reply, Mamarok.
Well, I found an additional workaround in order to avoid restarting the computer. I created a script and put into the autostart programs in KDE settings.
Basically it just kills and restarts PulseAudio and just looks like this:

killall pulseaudio
pulseaudio --start

Saved it to a file called pulse.sh.

I had noticed that the PulseAudio processed was not stopped after ending the KDE session. Logging back into KDE and checking the PulseAudio process showed that its timestamp matched the one in the previous KDE session.

Now plasma-pa works OK using the startup script above.

Regards,
Chris