Audio and soundcard issues in Arch-like system

Question

I have a recently installed Parabola OS (basically Arch with OpenRC) on my Lenovo 3134A11, and since the beginning I have had no audio in the system. The thing is that when I run pavucontrol, the window that opens freezes in "Establishing connection to PulseAudio. Please wait.", and trying any pactl variants says "Connection refused".

Seeing this, I went to alsamixer to see what's happening.  I put everything to the maximum and noticed that increasing-decreasing "Rear mic" with loopback enabled causes noise in the speaker.  So I think that means the system and Alsa recognize the driver; but I still have no audio.

Here is some general info that I hope may help to illuminate the problem:

Kernel version: 4.20.11-gnu-1

lspci -v:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
        Subsystem: Lenovo 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 31
        Memory at fe600000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>
        Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
        Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel

aplay -l:

aplay: device_list:272: no soundcards found...

amixer:

amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such file or directory

sudo aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav:

ALSA lib pcm_direct.c:1966:(snd1_pcm_direct_parse_open_conf) The field ipc_gid must be a valid group (create group audio)
aplay: main:828: audio open error: Invalid argument

("root" user has the same issues)

find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep snd-hda-intel:

/lib/modules/4.20.11-gnu-1/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-intel.ko.xz

alsa force-reload:

bash: alsa: command not found

cat /proc/asound/modules:

0 snd_hda_intel

cat /proc/asound/version:

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version k4.20.11-gnu-1.

cat /proc/asound/cards:

 0 [PCH            ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
                      HDA Intel PCH at 0xfe600000 irq 31

Hope that you guys can figure this out!

Answer 1

It turns out that, for some god-knows-why reason, PulseAudio didn't start on startup (that's why running pavucontrol freezes the window either in normal and root, pactl didn't work, etc). After initializing PulseAudio with pulseaudio --start it turns out another problem: audio works only in root.  After a little research I discovered that I can add audio group manually with no issues with sudo groupadd audio (I thought that it has to come "by fabric") and sudo gpasswd -a user audio, then I just reset and woosh audio.