It's been a while since I have used vnc in the way I am about to describe. I used to be able to vnc into my server, launch xmms, and listen to music from my server. In other words, my laptop would simply be a remote control and xmms would be running on the server, playing the songs. When I tried it today, a sound card could not be found. When I logged on locally as the user that vnc uses, I am able to listen to music with no problem. To test this further, I logged on as a different user, su'ed over to that particular user and again, even though I was on the actual computer, xmms complained about not being able to find a soundcard. I hope this doesn't confuse anybody.

I have an update. It seems that with FC5, which ever user is logged in, that is the user that has permissions on /dev/dsp. WTF!?! I have an emu10k1 sound card and it can handle multiple sound at once. Why does FC5 change the permissions? Is there a way to stop this? My current runlevel is 5, should I change it to 3? Any help would be appreciated.

Most distros change the permissions of local devices (sound card, floppy, cdrom, etc.) to whoever is logged in at the local console. This seems like the logical thing to do, since usually when someone is logged on remotely, they are not close to the machine.

You could change the permissions on the device, but to do it permanantly, you will have to change some configuration files. I don't know for sure how it's done on Fedora, but check in /etc/udev/rules.d for a file called permissions.rules.

You probably have a line that says:

SUBSYSTEM=="sound", MODE="600"

Change it to:

SUBSYSTEM=="sound", MODE="666"

Tried that, no luck. No matter what I change the permissions to, the person logged on locally takes ownership of /dev/dsp and who knows what other devices. Any other ideas?