Hi,

I just transformed an old Pentium III 500 into a headless jukebox. It's installed in the basement, near the stereo. There's only a base CentOS system on it (GNOME unchecked, package customization checked and then everything unchecked). From there on, I just installed the ALSA utils, and vorbis-tools. The machine is only supposed to do one thing (and to do it well, UNIX philosophy :oD): fetch an audio stream (produced by MPD/Icecast upstairs on a big PC) and then output it from the soundcard to the AUX IN from the stereo.

I have a partial - and near-total - success, in that everything runs fine... as root user. Whenever I try to run alsamixer as a normal user on that box, I get the following error message:

[kikinovak at jukebox ~]$ alsamixer

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

Any idea what could be wrong here?

Cheers from the hot south of France,

Niki

I realize this is an old thread, but I, too, was building a standalone jukebox last night and ran into this same issue. I was trying to configure the jukebox by SSHing into it, and I could only perform sound tasks, including running alsamixer and mpd, as root. Comparing to another CentOS box, the jukebox's /dev/dsp was owned by root and the other CentOS box's /dev/dsp was owned by the logged in user. Aha, I figured I needed to be logged in as a user to the physical jukebox machine in order to grant ownership to the soundcard. The jukebox had no user logged into it, as it had just rebooted. A solution, of course, would be to enable autologin on the jukebox. I can't give the technical answer as to why this happens, but just how it happens and how I managed to get it to work. I hope this helps.

-Brian