Hello all,

I recently logged in as one of my other users who is set up to run Gnome (I'm intending my mother to eventually use this account). Anyway, after adding a few desktop shortcuts and removing a few minor panel items I logged out and logged back in as me (I use KDE). On logging in I get an error message from Alsa about /dev/dsp. I have a look, and the other user I was using before has claimed ownership to a bunch of files in /dev and set permissions to 600. The files in questions are apm*, audio*, beep, console, dsp*, fb* plus others. The user was not root, nor did I use su at anytime.

My question is, how and why did this happen, and what is the easiest way to fix it? Is there a way to "undo" the commands? I don't want to reset the permissions because I'm not sure what they originally were.

Thanks for any advice.

Cheers

Ovalteen

ummm... if this helps, which it may not, every file you named (on my machine) is listed has permissions set to 600, except audio1 which has permissions set to 777. and they are all owned by root. if i were you i'd just chmod and chown everything, log in as the user on gnome and root in different tty's and look to see what is changing it... then probably summit a bug report respectively... post what you find out, because i use gnome...

sounds like the esound daemon which gnome uses by default as the software sound mixer is still holding on to /dev/dsp. you can 'su -' then run 'lsof /dev/dsp' to see what process is locking the /dev/dsp. if you had a soundcard which supported hardware mixing then this wouldn't be an issue as multiple connections to /dev/dsp would be allowed. KDE by default uses arts for its software audio mixing and when it finds that /dev/dsp is in use by something else on login then it can throw an error like you are experiencing. the permissions on your devices sound fine but if you are paranoid you can use /dev/MAKEDEV to recreate the devices in /dev, see 'man MAKEDEV' or google for makedev for more information on how to use this.

Thanks kryptonite for the info. I ended doing pretty much that and changing the permissions. I haven't run into any problems yet so I think they are OK (I chowned and set 600 and 660, depending on what seemed appropriate).

anonobomber, I think you might be right about all the sound stuff. I remember I clicked the volume control applet in gnome and might have moved the slider, so that might have done something. Thanks for the tip about makedev, if I run into problems I'll try that method.

If I work it out I'll post back.

Cheers

Ovalteen