No sound on my Linux box and alsamixer gives error in function snd_ctl_open failed

On my newly installed Fedora box (I said “newly” but this may be a bit misleading as I installed FC9, which is an old distribution but I have to use it for compatibility reasons with other software…) I had the following problem:

I had no sound (e.g. YouTube plays a clip and there is no sound) and starting alsamixer as a non-root user gives me the following error:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory

I admit that ALSA and Linux sound configuration is not my forte, so this particular problem was solved with help from one of my colleagues (Emo).  I got as far as checking that my audio hardware was detected :

# /sbin/lspci | grep -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller


Here’s what Emo made me do to solve the “function snd_ctl_open failed” problem:

Looking into /dev/snd/ and alsamixer revealed that all devices were owned by root:root so users could not write to the sound card.This apparently is a problem with that distro’s installer as it should have configured udev to make these devices user-writable.

Our quick solution was to transfer group ownership of these devs to group users:

cd /dev/snd/
sudo chown root:users *
cd /dev
sudo chown root:users mixer


After that the sound worked (I tested with a tube clip)!

The problem with this quick fix to the no sound problem in alsamixer is that all these changes will disappear upon reboot so I will have to execute the above chown commands each time I reboot 🙁

Naturally this is not a proper solution, but at least it proves that the problem lies exactly there. At some point later on (today? if time permits..) I will post here the proper solution which is (as done on many other distributions where sound and alsamixer work properly for intended users right from the start):

create a group audio (or sound, snd, alsa, whatever…);
add all users who are permitted to play sound to that group;
make udev set the group ownership of the above devices to this group.

… cheers, hope this helps at least a little 😉