I do a pretty good job of keeping my Arch Linux installation up to date. What I don’t do a great job of is reading all of the important news and messages that scroll on by when I do.
Generally, this isn’t a problem, but it did bite me recently. After a full upgrade, I went ahead and rebooted. Upon returning to my desktop, Cider wouldn’t play. I tried Spotify, same deal. YouTube videos wouldn’t even play, let along emit sound. Even the sound section of GNOME wouldn’t play the test clips.
At this point, I checked the Arch site to see if there was some recent bit of news. Crickets. So I pulled up some logs to see what was up. I ran sudo journalctl --follow and then attempted to play some audio again. Things lit up, with some unfamiliar errors related to pulseaudio:
Mar 11 09:59:52 xps15.josh pulseaudio[2211]: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended.
Mar 11 09:59:52 xps15.josh pulseaudio[2211]: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended.
Mar 11 09:59:52 xps15.josh pulseaudio[2211]: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended.
Mar 11 09:59:52 xps15.josh gnome-control-c[4788]: Failed to play sound: Invalid stateI did a bit of research, and evidently something was swapped around, and I was supposed to migrate from pulseaudio to pipewire-pulse. Okay great, this should be a pretty easy fix, go ahead and install the new package and let it take care of the rest.
No such luck, as pipewire-pulse couldn’t be installed because it needed to replace pulseaudio and pulseaudio was a dependency of pulseaudio-bluetooth. Quite the love triangle.
Worth mentioning, I don’t use any Bluetooth devices with this particular computer, so these steps may not be ideal if you do happen to use Bluetooth devices. That said, these steps may still be perfect, since I really don’t know much about this pipewire stuff.
Without any attachment to the Bluetooth package, I went ahead and removed it, yay -Rsn pulseaudio-bluetooth and waited for my computer to explode. When that didn’t happen, I attempted to install pipewire-pulse again as such, yay -S pipewire-pulse.
The package was still in conflict with pulseaudio, but it was able to handle removing and replacing it, unlike before.
After the package was installed, my audio came back online within a few moments. I still rebooted to make sure things were fine, and they were.
