Everything was working great about 3 hours ago on my maverick machine.Then an issue cropped up.
I ran the command chown -R someuser:somegroup .*, and before I had noticed the ., I hit Enter, and this mistake made that half my system was owned by someuser before I could stop it.
I managed to get everything back to root (namely, /sbin, /etc, /lib, and some stuff under /usr). I apt-get --reinstall installed a pile of packages, including ALSA.
Unfortunately, ALSA doesn't work for non-root users. That is, sudo aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Noise.wav works fine, but as an unprivileged user, it spits out
"cannot find card '0'"`
Although adding my users to the audio group might work, I'd read many places that this is no longer the solution to these problems.
So that leaves me with the question – where should I look to find my hosed permissions?
Best Answer
Okay, I got lucky, and noticed that the ACLs weren't set in /dev/snd
Just in case anyone happens upon a similar problem, I managed to fix it:
If anyone sees a problem with this, please respond in the comments, I want to make sure I did this right...