why does the terminal start pulseaudio?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 5 Jul 2020 19:51:38 +0100, Piscium wrote:
>[snip]
>3. confirmed that pulseaudio was not running
>4. started the xfce terminal
>5. pulseaudio immediately started running.
>[snip]
>If I log into a xfce session then pulseaudio also gets started even if
>I don't start the xfce terminal. In the xfce panel I have a bunch of
>xfce plugins configured.
>
>I do not have the xfce pulseaudio plugin installed. I am on Arch Linux.

Hi,

if you won't use pulseaudio at all, but you would like to fulfil
dependencies, install two dummy packages. Those are the PKGBUILDs, just
run makepkg:

pkgname=pulseaudio
pkgver=2020.07.05
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Dummy package"
arch=('any')
provides=('pulseaudio')
conflicts=('dummy')

pkgname=pulseaudio-bluetooth
pkgver=2020.07.05
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Dummy package"
arch=('any')
provides=('pulseaudio-bluetooth')
conflicts=('dummy')

My guess is, that xfce4-terminal starts pulseaudio to simulate pcspkr
for bell usage. If you start any bloated DE, such as Xfce4, there's no
need to guess. Almost all, if not all bloated DEs default to the
pulseaudio sound server.

I'm on Arch Linux, too, but stopped using Xfce4. I'm still just using
some Xfce4 apps, xfce4-terminal is not one of them. If you want a
decent terminal, consider to build roxterm from AUR:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/roxterm/

FWIW I'm using the two mentioned dummy packages. I'm using plain ALSA
and on demand the jack sound server.

I've got https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/apulse/ installed, but
don't need it. However, it might be useful, if you want to get rid of
pulseaudio.

Fortunately my desktop PC has got a PC speaker, so I'm using it

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ lsmod | grep pcspkr
pcspkr                 16384  0

it just requires that the module is loaded.

Instead of Xfce4 I'm using openbox without a DE. I add whatever I like
to my openbox sessions, e.g. Xfce4 software.

FWIW I also installed a dummy package for gvfs. IIRC gvfs is just an
optional dependency for Xfce4, but for a lot of other apps, it's a hard
dependency for absolutely no reasons.

Regards,
Ralf