No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland

radiatedradio · 2025-08-19 15:29:41

Hi, I installed excalibur on my thinkpad X13 gen4 (AMD model) with KDE, default settings last friday. Audio works through pulseaudio, but because of wayland, screensharing etc. don't, if I use pulse. I switched to pulse that day, as I didn't realize that screensharing wouldn't work.

KDEs own audio manager applet gives me the error "Connection to sound service lost". When I tried running pipewire manually through my terminal, pipewire gives no output, KDE can't connect to it. If i run it as root it gives me this error, I think it's unrelated:

sudo /usr/bin/pipewire
[sudo] password for radio:
[E][17:22:35.567850] mod.protocol-native | [module-protocol-: 756 init_socket_name()] server 0x56376851b960: name pipewire-0 is not an absolute path and no runtime dir found. Set one of PIPEWIRE_RUNTIME_DIR, XDG_RUNTIME_DIR or USERPROFILE in the environment
[E][17:22:35.567954] pw.conf | [ conf.c: 602 load_module()] 0x5637685040a0: could not load mandatory module "libpipewire-module-protocol-native": No such file or directory
[E][17:22:35.568044] default | [ pipewire.c: 124 main()] failed to create context: No such file or directory

What could be the issue? I know the easiest solution would be to switch back to X11, but on a newer machine, I like waylands features, and nowadays support for it is mostly standard. What additional details should I provide?

Thanks to everyone in advance.

greenjeans · 2025-08-19 16:11:46

Kinda confusing here, do you have Pipewire installed? From those messages it doesn't seem like it.

I know nothing about KDE, but I imagine that like Mate it probably already has it's own mixer installed, so in reality you don't need Pulse or Pipe for sound.

Support for Wayland is not mostly standard. If you're going to use it, you should know it has many shortcomings.

steve_v · 2025-08-19 23:41:01

radiatedradio wrote:

running pipewire manually through my terminal

That's not how pipewire is meant to be started.

radiatedradio wrote:

sudo /usr/bin/pipewire

That's not even remotely how pipewire is meant to be started.

radiatedradio wrote:

What could be the issue?

Failure to read the documentation or search the forum.

greenjeans wrote:

do you have Pipewire installed

They do, but they're starting only one part of it, manually, and with sudo for maximum borkage (sudo is always the answer ). It can't find it's runtime directory, because that env is not set for root (even if sudo propagated those vars, which it doesn't).
Even if it could, sound still won't work without wireplumber (and pipewire-pulse if you want the KDE mixer and stuff).

Last edited by steve_v (Yesterday 00:00:11)

zapper · Yesterday 02:49:25

@greenjeans its supposed to be started with whatever init is chosen (bopenrc/sysvinit/runit/s6)

I think that is what steve_v means.

That is how I start alsa and pulseaudio. I imagine it works similarly for pipewire

Unless its set to start this way.

Last edited by zapper (Yesterday 02:49:43)

steve_v · Yesterday 06:23:41

its supposed to be started with whatever init is chosen (bopenrc/sysvinit/runit/s6)

No, it (all 3 daemons, in the right order) is supposed to be started as systemd user-units, with dependency management and supervision. Most distros without systemd ship a variety of (usually shell) hacks to do the same, with varying degrees of reliability...
Devuan ships nothing, and just leaves the mess for the end-user to figure out.

I think that is what steve_v means.

It is not.

how I start alsa

You don't "start" alsa, alsa is kernel drivers and doesn't include any daemons to start. Do you actually have any idea what you are talking about?

I imagine it works similarly for pipewire

Imagination does nothing toward Devuan shipping a pipewire package that works out of the box, or solving the OP's problem.

All of this has been discussed thoroughly in the thread I linked above, why are you "imagining" instead of reading that?

Last edited by steve_v (Yesterday 06:29:28)

brocashelm · Yesterday 07:19:55

Another forum masterpiece from the one and only Steve_V.

greenjeans · Yesterday 13:42:42

Another forum masterpiece from the one and only Steve_V.

Lol, you think that's gold, just wait until Igor finds this thread.

greenjeans · Yesterday 13:48:25

Steve's right, and crap like this is why I don't use sound servers/mixers. Alsa has no daemon, it starts up when called on to work. Pulse has a daemon, I imagine Pipe does too though i've never used it.

Like I said before, Mate has it's own mixer built in and I imagine KDE does too, so now the OP has 3 mixers stacked on top of each other if using Pulse and Pipe both.

FYI on Excalibur, there's some boot-up errors on the versions i've tried, complaining about some missing alsa rules file, that's actually not missing.

Andre4freedom · Yesterday 14:38:35

@greenjeans
that's strange, I have tested Excalibur with both, XFCE and Cinnamon and never had such boot-tome error messages about missing ALSA rules... (Tested with OpenRC though, could this make the difference?)

greenjeans · Yesterday 14:58:27

@greenjeans
that's strange, I have tested Excalibur with both, XFCE and Cinnamon and never had such boot-tome error messages about missing ALSA rules... (Tested with OpenRC though, could this make the difference?)

Interesting, possibly due to my only testing with systems rolled over from Daedalus to Excalibur, both Mate and Openbox. An error about alsa-restore rules. Come to think of it I haven't checked the most recent iso I made to see if the error was still there.

radiatedradio · Yesterday 16:12:52

Thank you everyone for the very helpful answers, devuan does not ship a service file for starting pipewire, kde does not have a built in audio manager, or at least that also doesn't ship with devuan, as I had 0 audio servers running when I installed my system. I tried starting pipewire through the terminal with pipewire,wireplumber and pipewire-pulse, did not fix the issue. As for the "sudo is always the answer" I said "IF I run it as root", I tried starting it manually as my normal user as well.

Looking through the documentation would be a great idea, if any other init systems which aren't systemd were supported.

A solution I found, which i haven't tried yet, is that gentoo ships a pipewire launcher service file in their distro for openRC, which I'm using.

I also wouldn't have to deal with this if by default when I install KDE with the whole distro, I didn't get a broken sound server, and having to manually switch to pulse.

Last edited by radiatedradio (Yesterday 16:20:09)

RedGreen925 · Yesterday 17:10:58

I also wouldn't have to deal with this if by default when I install KDE with the

For KDE all that is needed is to have the pipewire and wireplumber packages installed and a script in the autostart used by it.

zeus@9600k:~/bin$ cat pipewire_start.sh 
#!/bin/bash

# Added to start pipewire on login to desktop
# https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=5867
# was the ~/.xsessionrc -rw-rw-r-- permissions
# now ~/bin/pipewire_start.sh executable permissions
# as bash script loaded from KDE autostart in System Settings

# kill any existing pipewire instance to restore sound
pkill -u "$USER" -fx /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse 1>/dev/null 2>&1
pkill -u "$USER" -fx /usr/bin/wireplumber 1>/dev/null 2>&1
pkill -u "$USER" -fx /usr/bin/pipewire 1>/dev/null 2>&1

# start pipewire
exec /usr/bin/pipewire &

# wait for pipewire to start before attempting to start related daemons
while [ "$(pgrep -f /usr/bin/pipewire)" = "" ] ; do
   sleep 1
done

# start wireplumber
exec /usr/bin/wireplumber &

# start pipewire-pulse
exec /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse &

It works perfectly fine every time I log into my desktop.

radiatedradio · Yesterday 17:16:17

Thank you very much for this, although as an autostart script, for some reason it didn't autostart. Running it manually through the terminal did get it to work. I might write an openrc script for it tomorrow and put it up here.

g4sra · Yesterday 17:17:37

@RedGreen925
I'm curious, why do you 'exec' when you are also '&' backgrounding ?

RedGreen925 · Yesterday 22:39:10

I'm curious, why do you 'exec' when you are also '&' backgrounding ?

No clue I just adapted what was in the .xsessionrc file to a script for bash. It works and I was not interested trying any other way, I rather like sound it is the reason I switched to Linux when windows messed up my sound card well over twenty-six years ago now.

g4sra · Yesterday 22:54:54

OK thanks for the explanation @RedGreen925, if it works don't fix it

You used three of my pet hates there altogether (pulse, wireplumber, pipewire) and was wondering if there was some black magic incantation with 'exec'ing the environment that you were leveraging that I didn't know about.

steve_v · Today 00:20:58

A solution I found, which i haven't tried yet, is that gentoo ships a pipewire launcher service file in their distro for openRC, which I'm using.

gentoo-pipewire-launcher is intended to be started per-user as part of session startup (e.g. xdg-autostart or xinitrc), not by openrc.
As I said above, pipewire is intended to be started by systemd user units for each user login, not system-wide by init as root. Current openrc releases do have (experimental) user-unit support which could handle this... But this is Devuan we're talking about here so good luck finding current anything in the repos.

To quote the Gentoo wiki page (which you should also read completely):

There is no truly standardized way (outside of systemd) to load PipeWire when starting a graphical shell, and users need to choose the correct approach based on how their graphical environment is started.
In all cases where systemd user services are not being used, PipeWire must be started before anything that might try to connect to any sound input or output, such as a volume monitoring applet.

Using the gentoo script is one option, others are discussed in the thread I linked earlier. How you actually launch any of those depends on your graphical session, for KDE on wayland, xdg-autostart is probably easiest.

FWIW, this was my suggestion, and is what I'm using right now on Gentoo (It works well enough I haven't gotten around to moving it over to openrc user-units). Make of it what you will, it does require backporting a not-ancient daemon version from unstable.

I also wouldn't have to deal with this if by default when I install KDE with the whole distro, I didn't get a broken sound server, and having to manually switch to pulse.

Indeed. While it is likely a dead horse, I'll flog it some more here: Devuan, as a supposed leader in systemd-free distros... Does precious little leading.
Where real work is needed to get things working without systemd, solutions are lifted from Gentoo (eudev, elogind, opentmpfiles etc.). Everything else is just banning packages rather than fixing them, or shipping broken setups like we see here with wayland and pipewire.
I have asked repeatedly what Devuan's direction and preferred solution for user-units is, and all I get is a bunch of "nothing, wait for Debian to fix it" wilful inaction.

Last edited by steve_v (Today 00:37:26)

zapper · Today 00:42:12

steve_v nevermind then... my bad.

golinux · Today 00:57:55

@steve_v . . . That choice was made because we have NEVER had enough devs to do it any other way. You talk a lot and are very helpful on the forum but how many packages have YOU offered to "sanitize'?

Your comment about willful inaction is not only inaccurate, it is insulting to those of us in the trenches who have given a decade of our lives doing the best we can while you have sniped from the sidelines.

Continuing to be part of the problem or deciding to become part of the solution is a choice and we need more users to step up.

steve_v · Today 01:17:35

Ahh yes, Mr. Pot turns up to shout at Mr. Kettle, right on queue.

how many packages have YOU offered to "sanitize'

Right back at you^. I don't see any code or package contributions at all in your history on git.devuan.org...

in the trenches

... Twiddling with documentation, web-infra and theming. Not fixing broken packages or implementing solutions for systemd-dependent components.

Four months ago I asked:

What I would like to know is: Which way does Devuan intend to handle this, and is there anything that needs doing there? What solutions are being considered? I contributed one possibility way upthread, is it worth persevering with or is Devuan going to do something totally different?
Is anything at all happening, or are we just going to do the "wait for debian to make a move, then delay release for 3 months while we put out fires" thing again?

And I still don't have an answer. How do you expect "users to step up" when there is nothing but radio-silence from the supposed leadership?

To take Gentoo as an example: There's an established mentorship program and a well documented pathway to moving from "random packages in user overlay" to "peer-reviewed packages in guru" to "dev reviewed packages in official repo" to "dev comitting directly to official repo".
There's a whole set of documentation and guidelines on the subject, and right from the beginning there are active developers in the user IRC channel when we have random questions. Hell, asking there often gets official packages fixed in minutes.
Where is any of this stuff for Devuan?

Last edited by steve_v (Today 01:26:18)

zapper · Today 01:28:05

Never thought I would see steve_v getting pissed at you golinux.

Oof...

What a weird day

golinux · Today 01:37:06

LOL! I have never written code and I couldn't write a bash script if my life depended on it! That is not what I do for Devuan. Yet Devuan would not be what is is today without my presence. If you don't know that by now you really haven't a clue about what makes Devuan tick.

But contemplate this . . . Dyne only provided airfare to the Amsterdam Conference to two people and I was one of them. Seems that Jaromil had a different assessment of the value of my contributions to Devuan . . .

Sorry to tell you that it is you with the clueless, false narrative, steve_v.

steve_v · Today 01:47:39

getting pissed

I've been pissed with this whole situation for some time, because nothing at all appears to be happening, and the standard tag-line around here when it comes to systemd-dependent packages is "just don't use them"... While the distro steadily looses functionality and the users steadily loose options.
Systemd is not going to go away, and burying our heads in the sand isn't going to fix anything.
User-units are a thing, and we need a solution. Define what that solution should look like and someone might just provide it.

EDX-0 dreamed up a whole user-init system, is Devuan interested? Is this the solution we should be contributing to? Who knows, there's nothing but silence from leadership.

Need more devs? Sure, every project needs more devs. You don't get more devs by bitching about it, you get them by training up more devs.
That means setting out what needs doing, how to go about doing it, and how to get it into the distro, then providing hands-on guidance and mentoring to make sure it doesn't break anything.

I have never written code and I couldn't write a bash script if my life depended on it

And yet, here you are shouting at others for not doing those things.

Dyne only provided airfare to the Amsterdam Conference to two people and I was one of them.

Yes yes, I'm sure you're very important. We were talking about "sanitizing" packages, were we not? What do airfares have to do with that?

Last edited by steve_v (Today 02:03:13)

golinux · Today 02:03:13

I hear you and couldn't agree more. Sounds like you have a handle on exactly what's needed . . . no surprise there. Perhaps you might consider contributing your expertise to making it happen? Would love to have you on the team!!

steve_v · Today 02:06:50

Sigh...

steve_v wrote:

Four months ago I asked:
What I would like to know is: Which way does Devuan intend to handle this, and is there anything that needs doing there? What solutions are being considered? I contributed one possibility way upthread, is it worth persevering with or is Devuan going to do something totally different?
Is anything at all happening, or are we just going to do the "wait for debian to make a move, then delay release for 3 months while we put out fires" thing again?
And I still don't have an answer.

Passive-agressive response still fails to answer question.

steve_v wrote:

mentorship program... documented pathway... active developers in the user IRC channel
Where is any of this stuff for Devuan?

Or other question for that matter.

Is it any wonder I said "fsck it then", and moved over to Gentoo? Why would I care? The horse is at the water, but it's not drinking.

Perhaps you might consider contributing

Perhaps, if it's less painfull than pulling proverbial teeth. Are you on the Recruiters Team? Where is the IRC channel to find a mentor and who should I ask? Are there tests I would need to take? Where do I find documentation on this process?
Does this project actually have an organised development process, or is it just a collection of random personal-project warts on Debian's backside?

You want contributors? Make it easy, make it organised. "Why don't YOU $whatever" is pointless if you don't also set out what, how, and who to contact.

Last edited by steve_v (Today 02:37:37)

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#1 2025-08-19 15:29:41

No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland

#2 2025-08-19 16:11:46

Re: No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland

#3 2025-08-19 23:41:01

Re: No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland

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