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.
