[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#481515: Bug#481515: Bug#481515: alsa-utils: 'alsactl restore' fails on ICE1724 soundcards

[David Witbrodt]

> Opppps, sorry, I have forgotten to say that as root I have sound, but not 
> as user, altough user is in audio group. I tried now to remove my personal 
> configuration ( ~/.asounrc ) and reboot, but nothing. Demostration sound 
> reproduction as user and as root:
[...]
> [AO_ALSA] Playback open error: Permission denied
> Could not open/initialize audio device -> no sound.
> Audio: no sound
> Video: no video


  Sorry if I am guessing wrong here, but it looks like a problem I once
had when installing ALSA without Debian package management.  You clearly
have a permissions problem ("Permission denied"), but the solution to this
was not obvious to me.
  In my case, I found that only the root user had access to the files in
/usr/share/alsa, and I needed to extend read permission for all the files
in that directory to my regular users.  You can check to see if the
permissions are good with something like this:

    ls -lR /usr/share/alsa |more

Make sure the files have permissions like this,

    -rw-r--r--

and the dirs have permissions like this,

    drwxr-xr-x

  If the permissions are wrong, something like this might fix it:

    chmod -R  u+r  /usr/share/alsa


  Your problem may be something else entirely, but it reminds me of the
time when I had this kind of permissions mixup.


HTH,
Dave W.