sound applet in gnome (and device permissions)

[H. S.]

Hi,

In a pentium machine running FC4 that I just helped a friend upgrade
(and install xine, bittorrent, change mirrors to update faster, etc) I
notice that a user's volume applet on the gnome panel doesn't change. If
a user tries to change the level of the column, the marker reverts to
it's original position and nothing changes.

alsamixer however, does work.

I was wondering, where could the problem be? I first guessed that
perhaps the user needs to belong to the "audio" (or "sound") group, but
such a group doesn't exist. The device /dev/dsp is actually root:root owned:
> ls -l /dev/dsp
crw-------  1 root root 14, 3 Feb 23  2004 /dev/dsp

And on a maybe related note, why are /dev/hdc (for optical drive)
permissions root:disk? Does a normal user need be a "disk" group member?
Shouldn't the optical drives belong to a 'cdrom' groups and all users
who can use drive should also be 'cdrom' group members?

thanks,
->HS
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