As described in my earlier post, disabling pulseaudio and setting ALSA audio for Linux Kodi setup should be easy. Unfortunately, stopping pulseaudio from respawing was not possible until pulse audio daemon was uninstalled. Here is description of this simple solution.
First just to note that my scenario is standalone Kodi HTPC and pulseaudio is not really needed. After fresh Fedora 29 installation I followed steps from my post:
Described steps didn’t work no matter what was tried – global settings, pulseaudio setting for user and so on. Finally I typed “dnf remove” command and expect to see a large dependency list. Surprisingly, dnf displayed only several packages:
[root@kodi ~]# dnf remove pulseaudio Dependencies resolved. =============================================================== Package Arch Version Size =============================================================== Removing: pulseaudio x86_64 12.2-1.fc29 3.8 M Removing dependent packages: pulseaudio-module-x11 x86_64 12.2-1.fc29 76 k Removing unused dependencies: rtkit x86_64 0.11-20.fc29 153 k speexdsp x86_64 1.2-0.14.rc3.fc29 516 k Transaction Summary =============================================================== Remove 4 Packages Freed space: 4.5 M Is this ok [y/N]: y Running transaction check Transaction check succeeded. Running transaction test Transaction test succeeded. Running transaction Preparing Running scriptlet: pulseaudio-module-x11-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Erase: pulseaudio-module-x11-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Erasing : pulseaudio-module-x11-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Erase: pulseaudio-module-x11-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Erase: pulseaudio-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Running scriptlet: pulseaudio-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Erasing : pulseaudio-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Erase: pulseaudio-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Erase: speexdsp-1.2-0.14.rc3.fc29.x86_64 Erasing : speexdsp-1.2-0.14.rc3.fc29.x86_64 Erase: speexdsp-1.2-0.14.rc3.fc29.x86_64 Running scriptlet: speexdsp-1.2-0.14.rc3.fc29.x86_64 Erase: rtkit-0.11-20.fc29.x86_64 Running scriptlet: rtkit-0.11-20.fc29.x86_64 Erasing : rtkit-0.11-20.fc29.x86_64 Erase: rtkit-0.11-20.fc29.x86_64 Running scriptlet: rtkit-0.11-20.fc29.x86_64 Verifying : pulseaudio-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Verifying : pulseaudio-module-x11-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 Verifying : rtkit-0.11-20.fc29.x86_64 Verifying : speexdsp-1.2-0.14.rc3.fc29.x86_64 Removed: pulseaudio-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 pulseaudio-module-x11-12.2-1.fc29.x86_64 rtkit-0.11-20.fc29.x86_64 speexdsp-1.2-0.14.rc3.fc29.x86_64 Complete!
After deinstallation pulse packages and rebooting Kodi HTPC, pulseaudio was no longer displayed in processes. Now it was possible to select ALSA devces in Kodi system -> audio settings. And one note at the end. Environment variable AE_SINK was changed to KODI_AE_SINK in Kodi 18 Leia (if you’ll try with adding “KODI_AE_SINK=ALSA” to .bashrc file).
Anyway, in my case without pulseaudio packages, this variable was not needed.
Cheers!