Hopefully this is a simple problem but I could not find any info when searching.

When i'm logged in as root everything(well, not everything, but that's beyond this topic) is working fine. But when I log in with my user account I have no sound(I think that everything else is working fine, for example viewing videos and playing games, but no sound).

My user is added to the wheel group, and just to see if it makes any difference I have also added it to video, audio and users. I have checked the permissions in the home directory(config files for xfce in particular) so that my user is the owner and has read and write permissions. I also copied the config files from /root to make sure they are the same(and of course changing permissions after copying so the copied files are no longer owned by root). Still the problem remains.

In xfce-mixer I have no volume controls and I cannot change the device from "default"(even though in the config files it's set to "hw:1" and nForce2). Maybe I don't have some sort of permission to change the device as user but, if so, where do I change that?

Any ideas what to do?

Just a thought...

Could it be that the soundcard needs to defined in xorg.conf? Although xorg.conf.example does not mention anything like that, except maybe loading the alsa module but I got it compiled into the kernel(which also makes me think that any changes to xorg.conf wont help).

I solved it(with help from Gentoo-forums ). When I added my user account to different groups it got removed from previous groups. Meaning that I first ran 'usermod -G audio' then "video"... adn "users". The result being that it only got added to the users-group.

So this time I first added the wheel group, then usermod -G audio as a suplementary group. This worked much better.

I also got the advice to use gpasswd instead of usermod, or issuing usermod -G and adding all the groups in the same command line(i.e usermod -G audio video users [username]).