I know this has been covered a million times, but I haven't yet seen an answer to this...

Got two normal users on my box: eric (me) and andrea (my wife). Both are in the group called audio.

Everything works fine for eric, but many times, almost every time in fact, that andrea tries to do anything involving sound output, there are permission errors. The audio mixer balks about /dev/mixer not having permission, sound doesn't work in XMMS, wine, etc. Yeah I know, just change the perms on /dev/mixer and related stuff. Works great - all I gotta do is chmod 660 /dev/sound/*, since everything in there is in group audio, and andrea gets sound.

The thing is, everything in the /dev/sound subdirectory is owned by eric! Permissions always seem to revert back to 600 after an unspecified amount of time, meaning that only eric gets to use the sound devices. Two questions:

1. Why are these owned by eric, and not root (like practically everything else in /dev)?

2. How do I get ownership/chmod changes to stick, so I don't keep having to change them?

All help and advice appreciated!

is this on devfs? if so just edit your /etc/devfsd.conf, e.g. mine says...

REGISTER sound/.* PERMISSIONS root.audio 666
REGISTER snd/.* PERMISSIONS root.audio 666

Yeah, it uses devfs... I did not know about devfs.conf. I've added those lines to it, so hopefully that does it. Perhaps I oughta go read up on devfs a bit. I've always been pretty hazy about how it works.

Thanks for the tip!