I had no sound in KDE when I installed Devuan 6.1. I cheated by going to
grok for an answer. Here are the steps that worked for me:

First some quick diagnostics:

1: Check which sound servers are present:
dpkg -l | grep -E 'pulseaudio|pipewire|wireplumber'


2: Check if pulseaudio daemon is running (probably not):

ps aux | grep -i pulseaudio

3: Check if pipewire is running:

ps aux | grep -E 'pipewire|wireplumber'
pactl info # if this works → shows "Server Name: PulseAudio (on
PipeWire...)" or similar


4: List audio devices:
aplay -l
pactl list sinks # if pactl works

Most likely fix is to switch to pipewire.

Pipewire is the modern direction and is probably partially installed
already.

1: Install the full pipewire audio stack if not present.
apt update
apt install pipewire-audio wireplumber pipewire-pulse pipewire-pulse

- pipewire-audio is often the main metapackage.
- pipewire-pulse provides PulseAudio compatibility (critical for most
desktop volume controls and older apps).
- wireplumber is the modern session manager (replaces
pipewire-media-session).
- 2: Restart the services:
- - logout and log back in is safest.
- - run the services manually (these may need to be started as normal user.)

3: if this doesn't work then reboot.

To test, do the following:
speaker -test -c 2
- or just play an audio file.

To make this permanent I have the following.

~/bin/pipewire-start.sh
cat ~/bin/pipewire-start.sh
#!/bin/bash
#
# Kill any existing instances
pkill -u "$USER" -fx /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse >/dev/null 2>&1
pkill -u "$USER" -fx /usr/bin/wireplumber >/dev/null 2>&1
pkill -u "$USER" -fx /usr/bin/pipewire >/dev/null 2>&1

# Start pipewire
/usr/bin/pipewire &

# Wait for pipewire to start
while [ -z "$(pgrep -f /usr/bin/pipewire)" ]; do
sleep 1
done

# Start wireplumber and pipewire-pulse
/usr/bin/wireplumber &
/usr/bin/pipewire-pulse &

cat ~/.config/autostart/pipewire-start.sh.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Exec=/home/rob/bin/pipewire-start.sh
Icon=
Name=pipewire-start.sh
Path=
Terminal=False
Type=Application

Put those two files in place and that's what worked for me.





--
"Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit
Atrocities" - Voltaire

"Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and
those who dare not, are slaves." - Lord Byron