Member Avatar for Slavi

Uh, just woke up and for breakfast I got to run into a Linux problem .. I turned on my pc (Kali Linux) and it has no sound? Ik weird .. used to work until I went to bed ... I have xfce DE. The error I get when I click on the mixer is GStreamer was unable to detect any sound devices. Some sound system specific GStreamer packages may be missing. It may also be a permissions problem.

If I run alsamixer in terminal I get the following:

ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Access denied

cannot open mixer: Connection refused

I checked drivers, I have gstreamer1.10-good/bad/ugly/base already installed (It was working until this morning). After about 2 hours of google world I am about to give up as nothing really comes close to solve this .. any suggestions?

  • 2 Contributors
  • 2 Replies
  • 704 Views
  • 1 Day Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by rubberman

Dani AI

Generated

A short, practical add-on: this was almost certainly a transient sound-server or driver hang. As discovered, a full power‑cycle cleared the state; as pointed out, kernel drivers can miss an event and become unresponsive. That pattern—kernel/driver stuck, a user‑space sound server that has crashed or been started as the wrong user, or a permissions/socket problem—is the usual culprit. A reboot fixes it quickly, but the steps below let you diagnose and fix it without powering off.

Try this quick checklist in a terminal (run one step at a time and inspect output):

# basic hardware/driver checks
aplay -l
lsmod | grep snd
dmesg | grep -i snd

# check sound server and processes
pactl info
ps aux | grep -i pulseaudio

# restart the user PulseAudio daemon
pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio --start
# on systemd user systems:
systemctl --user restart pulseaudio

# if the kernel module is stuck (replace module name if needed)
sudo modprobe -r snd_hda_intel && sudo modprobe snd_hda_intel

# see who holds the device nodes
sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*

If you get permission errors or the server won't start, check for a PulseAudio instance started as root (it creates sockets owned by root and blocks normal sessions). Move or back up your per‑user config before resetting it:

mv ~/.config/pulse ~/.config/pulse.bak
pulseaudio --start

Use logs to find root causes: inspect user/system journals or syslog for PulseAudio/ALSA messages. If restarts and module reloads keep fixing it, look for firmware/kernel updates or BIOS power‑management settings; intermittent hardware suspend/resume problems can trigger this. If your distro now uses PipeWire instead of PulseAudio, use the corresponding PipeWire service/tools to restart the audio stack.

Member Avatar for Slavi

Turn off -> Turn on fixed it, weird stuff

Member Avatar for rubberman

Sometimes, drivers miss a hardware event/interrupt and get into some space where they cannot continue to operate normally. At that point, it is time for the 3-finger salute, as you found out. As far as I'm concerned, drivers should be able to recover from this, but that is not a trivial exercise to accomplish in many cases.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.