this can be fixed by running pulseaudio -D in terminal
edit /etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop and replace start-pulseaudio-x11 with pulseaudio -D

I never reproduced this issue on my side. Did you experience it?

In any case, this is not afffecting sana, only kali-rolling maybe and that was possibly at a point of time where the switch to GNOME 3.16 was not yet completed.

This seems to be an indirect consequence of the fact that we run our user session as root. It works fine in a normal user.

https://sources.debian.net/src/pulseaudio/5.0-13/src/pulse/context.c/#L933

pulseaudio is now auto-spawned by whatever uses it first... but that doesn't work when the user is root.

Instead we will rely on systemd --user to start it for us (manually enabling the service in a live-build hook script).

So this has been fixed with a combination of:

• modifying live-build-config with hook calling "systemctl --user enable pulseaudio" so that systemd --user starts the pulseaudios which cant be auto-spawned
• adding dbus-user-session to kali-desktop-common so that when pulseaudio gets started with systemd --user it gets the required environment variable (for X and DBUS_USER_SESSION)