no pulseaudio daemon

Hello, I failed getting sound from my new asus H81M-K mainboard, which
replaced a server Tyan mainboard where sound was OK. Using the same two
mirror-raid HDs. OS Debian amd64 wheezy.

~$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point High Definition Audio
Controller (rev 05)

~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC887-VD Analog [ALC887-VD Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC887-VD Digital [ALC887-VD Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

~$ pacmd
No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon.

~$ echo "set-default-sink 1" | PULSE_RUNTIME_PATH=/var/run/pulse pacmd
Failed to create secure directory: Permission denied
No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon.
(same issue when running as superuser)

$ pavucontrol
connection failed

$ pulseaudio --dump-conf
daemonize = no
fail = yes
high-priority = yes
nice-level = -11
realtime-scheduling = yes
realtime-priority = 5
allow-module-loading = yes
allow-exit = yes
use-pid-file = yes
system-instance = no
local-server-type = user
cpu-limit = no
enable-shm = yes
flat-volumes = yes
lock-memory = no
exit-idle-time = 20
scache-idle-time = 20
dl-search-path = /usr/lib/pulse-2.0/modules
default-script-file =
load-default-script-file = yes
log-target = auto
log-level = notice
resample-method = auto
enable-remixing = yes
enable-lfe-remixing = no
default-sample-format = s16le
default-sample-rate = 44100
alternate-sample-rate = 48000
default-sample-channels = 2
default-channel-map = front-left,front-right
default-fragments = 4
default-fragment-size-msec = 25
enable-deferred-volume = yes
deferred-volume-safety-margin-usec = 8000
deferred-volume-extra-delay-usec = 0
shm-size-bytes = 0
log-meta = no
log-time = no
log-backtrace = 0
rlimit-fsize = -1
rlimit-data = -1
rlimit-stack = -1
rlimit-core = -1
rlimit-rss = -1
rlimit-as = -1
rlimit-nproc = -1
rlimit-nofile = 256
rlimit-memlock = -1
rlimit-locks = -1
rlimit-sigpending = -1
rlimit-msgqueue = -1
rlimit-nice = 31
rlimit-rtprio = 9
rlimit-rttime = 1000000

/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf
##################
# audio settings #
##################

# Specify default audio driver (see -ao help for a list).
ao=alsa,

# Use SDL audio driver with the esd subdriver by default.
#ao = sdl:esd

# Specify the mixer device.
#mixer = /dev/mixer

# Resample the sound to 44100Hz with the lavcresample audio filter.
#af=lavcresample=44100

# Output audio to S/PDIF
#ao=alsa:device=spdif
#ac=hwac3,hwdts,hwmpa,


##################
# other settings #
##################

# Pretend to be Window Media Player.
# Fixes playback when playlist and media file use the same URL.
#user-agent=NSPlayer/4.1.0.3856

# Pretend to be Quicktime
# Fixes playback for apple.com/trailers redirects
#user-agent="QuickTime"

# Pretend to be Realplayer SP
# Fixes playback for some video streaming sites
#user-agent=RMA/1.0

# Pretend to have lots of bandwidth
# Speeds up realmedia rtsp:// streams
#bandwidth=2000000

# Pretend to be Winamp
# Fixes playback of some NSV streams
#user-agent="Winamp NSV Player/5.12 (ultravox/2.0)"

# Drop frames to preserve audio/video sync.
#framedrop = yes

# Specify your preferred skin here (skins are searched for in
# /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins/<name> and ~/.mplayer/skins/<name>).
#skin = Abyss

# Resample the font alphamap.
# 0 plain white fonts
# 0.75 very narrow black outline (default)
# 1 narrow black outline
# 10 bold black outline
#ffactor = 0.75

# cache settings
#
# Use 8MB input cache by default.
#cache = 8192
#
# Prefill 20% of the cache before starting playback.
#cache-min = 20.0
#
# Prefill 50% of the cache before restarting playback after the cache
emptied.
#cache-seek-min = 50

# DVD: Display English subtitles if available.
#slang = en

# DVD: Play English audio tracks if available.
#alang = en

# get a default OSD font from fontconfig

fontconfig = yes
font = "Sans"
subfont-text-scale = 3


purge remove pulseaudio, in order to reinstall it, removes gnome too. One
of the many reasons why on other machines I installed xfce.


Thanks for advice
francesco pietra