I experience a strange problem with my fc4 installation. When logging in as root under gnome I don't get sound. Sound works after running "ainit root start" from a console window. It appears that pam_console is not calling ainit for user root. Has anybody experienced this behaviour? Am I missing some specific access rights for some file?

cheers,
Werner

I hate to state the obvious, but root doesn't need sound because you should never be logging in as root. Does your normal user have sound?

Okay, this problem should not be handled with "life or death" priority. However, to my best knowledge "no sound for root" has never been a design feature in Linux. I.e., the behavior my system is showing is erroneous and it should be fixed and not excused. Besides, if one component is not initialized properly during root login, there could be others that are more important. As long as we don't understand the nature of an error, we have to try to find it. Once we know the root cause, we may decide that it's not worth fixing...

This problem does not show for other users. From reading various man pages, it seems that pam_console is supposed to call ainit during the login procedure - at least for Fedora4. ainit is then initializing the sound system for the user (like creating /etc/alsa/pcm/dmix.conf). This does not take place when I log in as root. It seems however, that ainit is called to clean up during root-logout (i.e., to delete /etc/alsa/pcm/dmix.conf).

cheers,
Werner