# [Solved] [ALSA] /dev/snd being chown by :root on startup

## zeta0134

I'm fairly new to Gentoo, but I've got a level head on my shoulders and I've mostly been making things work as I went. This is my first successful installation from the ground up, and I'm proud of it.

Anyway, I currently have the Gnome2 desktop environment and ALSA working mostly wonderfully, except for a strange issue. When I first got ALSA working, only root was able to play sounds, and my regular users (despite being in the audio group) got nothing. No alsamixer, no volume control, no sound. Some tinkering and forums searching later I discovered that all the devices in /dev/snd existed, but were only read/writable by their owner (root) and were all in the root group. Weird. I checked /etc/group to be sure, and everything looks normal-- the audio group exists, and my users are all in that group.

Sure enough, chmod'ing /dev/snd so that it was read-writeable by group, and chowning it so that it was in the audio group fixed the issue-- my other users were able to play sounds. However, when I restart the computer, the permissions stay intact, but the devices themselves are owned by root again.

I'm sure there is a config file somewhere that's telling either udev or ALSA what group should own those devices, but I have no clue where to begin looking. I could always write a startup script to fix the permissions on boot, but that seems hacky-- I'd ideally like to know exactly what's going wrong.

I will point out that in an attempt to get sound working, thinking it was a driver issue, I had made the configuration steps necessary to emerge alsa-driver, but it failed to compile. I'm using ALSA as a module, and the Intel HD Audio driver as a module. I'm not using OSS support presently, in any form. This is on a Dell Inspiron n5030.

Does anyone have a lead? If there are outputs of commands or files I should list, I can certainly do so.

Thanks,

zetaLast edited by zeta0134 on Thu May 26, 2011 9:11 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## VoidMage

Well, unless you've messed up default udev rules, sound nodes should be owned by root:audio,

but even then, pulseaudio lurks.

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## zeta0134

Wow. I'm an idiot. Actually having udev start at boot would make it able to do its job a lot easier. Nevermind that long post, I fixed it.

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