Description of problem: Some time between Fedora 16 and Fedora 20, MIDI via alsa_seq (e.g. QSynth) stopped working due to permission issues with /dev/snd/seq. Specifically, existing users do not have permission to access /dev/snd/seq. How reproducible: Always? Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a user that does not belong to the 'audio' group 2. Try to start QSynth using the alsa_seq driver Actual results: "Qsynth1: Failed to create the MIDI driver (alsa_seq)." Expected results: QSynth works, other programs can connect and play MIDI over ALSA. Additional info: This was working in Fedora 16. A little while back I updated the system to Fedora 20, and was trying to use QSynth again and ran into the error above. I can work around it by giving everyone access to /dev/snd/seq (chmod go+rw), but that's a mighty big sledgehammer and probably not appropriate as a general solution. Besides, it should ideally work out of the box. Possibly related: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66861 p.s. JFTR I am *not* using JACK. At all. (In fact, because JACK *completely breaks* audio on my system, and umpteen things have somehow gotten into the habit of starting it when I don't want it, I've had to resort to putting '/usr/bin/true' in my ~/.jackdrc in order to prevent it from starting.) (Apologies for the component which is quite possibly wrong; I'm really not sure who "owns" this, and being a device, I can't 'rpm -qf' it.)
How did you upgrade from F16 to F20? That's quite a big step and who knows what might have gotten wrong. Also, does "setenforce 0" help?
I just tested qsynth on freshly installed and updated F20 and there are no MIDI problems. systemd-208-26.fc20.x86_64 qsynth-0.3.7-2.fc20.x86_64
I used fedup: 16 -> 17, 17 -> 18, 18 -> 19, 19 -> 20 (yes, I went through all three intervening versions). I'll have to get back to you on setenforce, but considering the permissions and information I found elsewhere (and that a simple permission change fixes it) I'll be surprised if it makes a difference. Hrm... you know, I think this might have been fixed already; don't trust me on that until I can get to my other machine to check, but logging in remotely, I'm now seeing: crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 1 Nov 5 22:43 seq ...which is NOT what I remember the permissions being when I filed the bug. (I do believe I've rebooted the machine since, however, hence the suspicion that it got fixed by some update...) Bonus: I have another F20 machine that is a *clean install* but that I haven't been running updates on rigorously (and hasn't been rebooted in at least 66 days) that has: crw-------+ 1 root audio 116, 1 Sep 30 16:43 seq So it does look strongly like this already got fixed somewhere. If you like I can check what outstanding updates I have on the other machine...
FYI: System I think is working: systemd-208-26.fc20.x86_64 System that probably isn't: systemd-208-22.fc20.x86_64
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1147248 ***
Yeah, I'll buy that. Thanks.