Firewire Audio on Linux: Fixing FFADO dbus-service Errors | Linux Today

Firewire Audio on Linux: Fixing FFADO dbus-service Errors

Written By
CS
Carla Schroder
Jul 13, 2010

“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:”

Complete
Story

CS

Carla Schroder

Linux Today Logo

LinuxToday is a trusted, contributor-driven news resource supporting all types of Linux users. Our thriving international community engages with us through social media and frequent content contributions aimed at solving problems ranging from personal computing to enterprise-level IT operations. LinuxToday serves as a home for a community that struggles to find comparable information elsewhere on the web.

Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2026 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.