Hello

I am having a problem with sound.

I am using Gentoo.
I have alsa built in to the kernel.
The system has Gnome and Windowmaker desktops.

The problem is that when a user plays a game such as enemy territory or unreal tournament the sound works fine. After the game is exited the sound still works fine for that user. the sound does not work for the next user who logs in.

I have tried to correct this by restarting alsa as root with "/etc/init.d/alsasound restart" and it appears alsa restarts but still no sound.

I have checked the file permissions for the devices in /dev/sound when the problem occures and the ownership of these files is that of the user who was playing the game but not of the user who is logged in.

I guess the bottom line is that the device files are not being reset or released properly after exiting one of these type of games. The only way I know of to reset the sound is by rebooting the system.

I must have set something up incorrectly. But what?

There must be a better way ?

Thanks.

Perhaps it would help to set up an 'audio' group, and add each user to that group.
Then the audio, dsp and mixer devices in /dev/ need to be owned by root:audio.