Hi,

I have a rather standard GNOME desktop installation, pulseaudio is *not*
running system wide, which is the default configuration for pulseaudio.

When I try to start timidity via "/etc/init.d/timidity start" it seems
to report success:

# /etc/init.d/timidity start
[ ok ] Starting TiMidity++ ALSA midi emulation....

but afterwards timidity is not running.
The first bug here is, that the initscript doesn't report an error.

I've checked the log files, and all I could find is this:

2012-11-26T00:01:53.517883+01:00 pluto pulseaudio[12033]: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to open cookie file '/etc/timidity/.pulse-cookie': No such file or directory
2012-11-26T00:01:53.517930+01:00 pluto pulseaudio[12033]: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to load authorization key '/etc/timidity/.pulse-cookie': No such file or directory
2012-11-26T00:01:53.518467+01:00 pluto pulseaudio[12033]: [pulseaudio] client-conf-x11.c: xcb_connection_has_error() returned true
2012-11-26T00:01:53.518664+01:00 pluto pulseaudio[12033]: [autospawn] core-util.c: Home directory /etc/timidity not ours.
2012-11-26T00:01:53.518691+01:00 pluto pulseaudio[12033]: [autospawn] lock-autospawn.c: Cannot access autospawn lock.
2012-11-26T00:01:53.518788+01:00 pluto pulseaudio[12033]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to acquire autospawn lock


Imho the default configuration of timidity should work out of the box or
otherwise the daemon should be disabled by default.

As README.Debian mentions something about starting timidity in the user
session, I tried (using the same command line parameters as the
system-wide process)

$ timidity -Os -iAD
 Requested buffer size 32768, fragment size 8192
ALSA pcm 'default' set buffer size 32768, period size 8192 bytes
TiMidity starting in ALSA server mode
ALSA lib seq_hw.c:457:(snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed:
Permission denied error in snd_seq_open

Now I'm stuck. It would be great if timidity had a better out-of-the-box
experience or better documentation how it is supposed to be used.

Cheers,
Michael

i found that if install the alsa-base package the permissions of
/dev/snd/seq was solved (audio group):

ragnarok@jola:~$ ls -l /dev/snd/seq
crw-rw---T+ 1 root audio 116, 1 dic  7 15:39 /dev/snd/seq

if you dont have this package the device has only access for root:root

Hello, I would like to share a temporary solution to this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/timidity/+bug/1035592/comments/2

Sophoklis

 > i found that if install the alsa-base package the permissions of
/dev/snd/seq was solved

That is completely unrelated.