Sound Devices on Arch?

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

Hi Steve and Chris,

That was simple, glad you got it solved.

But my problem was a little different. My non-root user was already in
the audio group, and the instances of aplay that produced that error
were in that user's procmailrc file. I am retrieving my email with
getmail, and delivering it directly to procmail, which has a couple of
recipes that use aplay to generate sounds when certain headers are
encountered. It was a setup that worked fine up until some particular
upgrade, after which it was only those aplays within the procmailrc
that were failing. Using aplay from a command prompt worked fine.  

The beep man page discusses setting that program to run suid, so I used
that technique with aplay. Lo and behold it worked. 

Chuck


On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 11:16:34AM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> Hi Chuck, Thanks for the idea but better yet, I found the fix which might
> be even better.  I forgot to do this first.  I connected my normal user, 
> 'steve' to the audio group.  Once I did that, not even aplay but espeak 
> worked better without the modification of individual permissions. 
> 
> Thanks again though; I had discovered during all this that I could do these commands
> in root without any problems.  Glad it was this easy.
> 
> On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 12:42:56PM -0500, Chuck Hallenbeck wrote:
> > Hi Steve,
> > 
> > On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 10:33:50AM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> > > I just installed Arch Linux on my new laptop but I have run into something
> > > I can't seem to figure out.  It seems that speech is working fine but I can't
> > > play any sound files.  Alsa complains that it can't find a device.
> > > Yet, my machine talks fine with Speakup, espeak and the espeakup connector.
> > 
> > I solved a similar problem here by changing permissions on aplay, like
> > this:
> > 
> > # chmod 4755 /usr/bin/aplay
> > 
> > I had to do the same thing with the beep command. If it's not too
> > serious a security risk, you might want to try it. It's an easy enough
> > change to undo if you need to.
> > 
> > Chuck
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > The Moon is Waxing Crescent (33% of Full)
> >       Website: hallenbeck.ftml.net, Jabber ID: chuckh1 at jabber.org
> >                                 --------
> >          You're not an alcoholic unless you go to the meetings.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 
The Moon is Waxing Crescent (33% of Full)
      Website: hallenbeck.ftml.net, Jabber ID: chuckh1 at jabber.org
                                --------
         You're not an alcoholic unless you go to the meetings.