Mixer device not present in /dev (alsa driver)

_SkeLeToN_

Hi,

I have the alsa-driver-0.9.0-rc2 installed on my gentoo 1.4.

EVerything works fine I have sound and everything but for some reason I cant get /dev/sound/mixer to appear ... Sometimes I have it and other time not.

When I boot my system I dont get any error complaining about something and there is nothing on the log.

I did recompile my kernel BUT i didn't do the make modules and make modules_install since I just added a feature into the kernel. Since I didn't change any module that should not affect any of my modules and they are loaded properly.

I ask this question because I use lineakd with one of my shortcut keybord key to change my mixer. When I go in X I got the error can open /dev/sound/mixer because ITS NOT THERE.

That is really strange .... I'm a little confuse plz any idea????

qwkbrnfox · Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2002 10:06 pm Post subject:

Hi,

I had something similar, maybe the same thing. Make sure that you are a member of the audio group. I would find that if I had accessed the mixer through root before I tried as a normal user (not a member of audio group) I could adjust the mixer. Otherwise, no way. The strange thing is that I could adjust the mixer at all, in the case where the user wasn't a member of audio.

It may not be the problem, but it's worth a try.

T

riceboy50 · n00b Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 48 Location: Southern CA

This seems like a common problem, I have read about it in several threads and never with a concise solution. I had this problem myself where it would randomly give that error when starting gnome. It didn't always happen though. It seems to be a lot less frequent after adding root and my user to the audio group manually (edit /etc/group) I believe audio is in the middle somewhere.

Good luck, I'd love to hear a decisive solution and hopefully have it added to the FAQ's.
_________________
I am logged on therefore I am...

_SkeLeToN_ · Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2002 11:04 pm Post subject:

Well my use is part of the audio group since my installed and it was working fine at first so I dont think this is the real problem ...

_SkeLeToN_ · Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2002 11:14 pm Post subject:

Well here's the thing :

If I boot my box for the first time I got this under /dev/sound
[quote]
ls /dev/sound/
total 0
0 drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Dec 31 1969 .
0 drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Dec 31 1969 ..
0 crw------- 1 skeleton audio 14, 9 Dec 31 1969 dmmidi
0 crw------- 1 skeleton audio 14, 2 Dec 31 1969 midi00
/quote]

One thing How come the device is under my user name and the audio group?

Is this alsa problem of devfs problem ??? I can't find why ...this is really annoying ...

oai79 · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2002 Posts: 55

I'm not sure if you and I encounter the same problem, but I have posted a question before saying that mixer... under /dev/sound disappear everytime I reboot. And I have to manually (as root) to load snd-pcm-oss, snd-mixer-oss to have these files to reappear.

The problem is gone now. I guess it is because somehow I created the files as root. Since then, they won't disappear. (I still don't know what exactly I did.)

I'm an absolute novice about this, and the above is purely conjecture.

_SkeLeToN_ · Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2002 4:01 pm Post subject:

Thanx to let know but I also discover that if I run a game with winex-cvs (Counter-strike) it will make appear /dev/sound/mixer .... this is strange really strange