“Arch Linux is my preferred audio production operating system,
but I keep an Ubuntu box up for testing because they’re always
pushing the bleeding edge and trying to make things nicer for end
users. Starting in 9.10, or maybe 9.04, Ubuntu packaged the FFADO
drivers. This was a nice convenience as most distros were not doing
this, and installing FFADO required a source build. Which was not
too bad, but still more work than using a package manager.“So I had FFADO all set up and working nicely, and then I
dist-upgraded to 10.04. Something changed, and when I started
ffado-mixer I kept getting an “ERROR: Could not communicate with
the FFADO DBus service” message, and it would not start. If I
started ffado-mixer from the graphical launcher it said “Somehow
the connection to the dbus-service of FFADO couldn’t be
established.” So after a lot of Web searching and experimentation I
finally figured out that the FFADO DBus service was not starting.
Argh! So this is how to start it:”