I suffer from the same problem - and the command above helps, thanks!
I guess this is a new bug in PR1.3
Just curious, are you also using power kernel v45? Or have you tried overclocking before using older kernels?
This is by far one of the most mysterious bugs I've heard about for the n900. I have noticed that nokia changed a few things in pulse audio for PR1.3, but nothing too significant, just stuff that made pulse run with less cpu consumption.
I found the reason. At least on my device pulseaudio application
depends on the library libFLAC.
On device start the system starts the pulseaudio daemon.
As it needs libFLAC the system tries to load this library.
The library is at
/opt/maemo/usr/lib/libFLAC.so.8.2.0
So the application pulseaudio fails to load
(cannot load library libFLAC.so, no such file)
Because all this happens before the internal mmc is mounted :-)
After failing to start the daemon the system tries this again and again.
It may work at some point when the internal mmc is mounted.
But sometimes the restart (respawn) happens to often and
the system stops this process.
I don't know why pulseaudio needs this lib, it has something to
do with the package decoders-support. But it seems this only
happens if you upgraded to PR1.3.
I did a reflash now and installed decoders-support.
The libFLAC library is on /opt/maemo ....
But pulseaudio starts without an error.
(And it does not depend on this library anymore,
ldd /usr/bin/pulseaudio shows which librarys are needed
by an executable/library).
Thanks for your input.
Good work on figuring out what the problem may be.
But why does 'start pulseaudio' also fail sometimes even after the internal mmc is mounted?
Also, I believe that it is related to PR1.3 but I only started to see this issue after installing kernel power .45
But why does 'start pulseaudio' also fail sometimes even after the internal mmc is mounted?
I don't know. I rebooted my device 20 times in the last two days. Just
to figure out why pulseaudio refused to start. Everytime
it was related to mounting the internal mmc.
This might be also related to one of recent updates - as I remember - I have not had this problem initially after flashing my N900 with PR1.3, but it became visible a while after I installed/upgraded quite a number of apps I used to keep on my device. Could that be related to Easy Debian (just my impression - still, I do not store Debian image on mmc)?
I flashed to 1.3, not upgraded, have not installed easy debian, and have experienced this problem without having installed power kernel. The problem now happens every time I reboot, root executing "start pulseaudio" always fixes it for me.
i had this issue after upgrading to pr 1.3. reboots would fix it but one i connect my bt headset, pulseaudio would die. in my case i fixed it with a reflash and i recall the problem started after i installed preenv - which could be a coincidence...
