Using fin on archlinux with i3 breaks PulseAudio

[taigrr]

When running amixer within a terminal emulator inside of i3 (launched with the .xinitrc option), the following is printed to the screen:

ALSA lib confmisc.c:855:(parse_card) cannot find card '0'
ALSA lib conf.c:5111:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_inum returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:422:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:5111:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1334:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:5111:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:5599:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib control.c:1481:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL sysdefault
cannot open mixer: No such file or directory

Running startx , everything operates as expected.

[taigrr]

I believe this is related to environment variables (maybe stuff related to DBUS) not being set correctly.

dunst (a notification service) is also not functioning, and my clipboard manager is broken, so this is all pointing to dbus at the moment.

Going to continue investigating.

[taigrr]

Modifying my .xinitrc from i3 to dbus-launch i3 allowed me to get dunst up and running again, still working on PulseAudio.

[taigrr]

Ok, feel free to close this.

startx apparently handles a lot of this default stuff for you, and replacing startx with bash --login removes all of the helpers.

PulseAudio wasn't functioning because it wasn't launched. Normally it automatically launches after running startx.

Adding pulseaudio --start to my .xinitrc made everything work again.

I will leave it open, as hopefully you might consider adding something about this to the README/docs, but no code change is required.

[andydotxyz]

I don't think that Fin (and it's docs) extend to managing .xinitrc content.
If you did follow some steps that I have forgotten we wrote please respond here so we can fix - otherwise I think I will close this.

[taigrr]

Probably not. Having this issue here is probably breadcrumbs enough for anyone else who needs the info.

[taigrr]

No reason to reopen this, but I am adding to the 'breadcrumbs':

There are additional issues with using fin on a default arch installation, due to the assumptions it makes about your system.

As mentioned earlier, startx handles a ton of things for you that bash --login doesn't help with.

• Be sure your XDG variables are set, such as export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u) towards the top of your .xinitrc. Failing to do so breaks dbus and as a result, systemctl in user mode.
• Make sure your user is in the audio group. Strangely, this isn't necessary when using startx.
• Don't use pulseaudio --start in your .xinitrc. That was a red herring.

[taigrr]

#4 will close this issue.