Ubuntu – Ubuntu 16.04 Audio not working correctly

16.04pulseaudiosound

Ubuntu 16.04 audio not working correctly. No hardware listed in audio settings and sound above 100% does not stay set. I have read another post telling me to delete the pulse folder from /home/.config/. This works for a few moments then the pulse folder is reinstalled. How do I delete this folder and have it not come back, or any other fix's. Thank you for any help with this issue.

This issue was related to firejail. I stopped running chrome in firejail and this issue was resolved. Running Google Chrome in firejail caused system sound hardware not to display in the sound settings, requiring a reboot.

Best Answer

Firejail's website describes a known problem with pulseaudio 7.0/8.0:

The srbchannel IPC mechanism, introduced in PulseAudio 6.0, was enabled by default in release 7.0. Many Linux users are reporting sound problems when running applications in Firejail sandbox. It affects among others Arch, Ubuntu 16.04 and Mint users. This problem was fixed PulseAudio version 9.0. The following configuration will mask the problem:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/pulse
$ cd ~/.config/pulse
$ cp /etc/pulse/client.conf .
$ echo "enable-shm = no" >> client.conf

If you have problems with PulseAudio 9.x use the previous fix, or configure enable-memfd = yes in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.

This fix worked for PulseAudio/Firejail problems I had on 16.04 that were similar to what you describe.

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