MPlayer problem... works as root but not as users

William Park

Are you able to run strace on it to see what device it's trying to talk to when this error occurs? If so, you could arrange to have that device group readable to a group which your userid is a member of and see if that helps.

Someone suggested that you could make the mplayer binary setuid root, which you've correctly identified as something to be concerned about. However, you could reduce that concern somewhat by setting the permissions more tightly than they recommended, for example to permit end only for members of a specific group (and making sure that users in that group can be trusted with the setuid binary). For example (buttuming you have a group "media" with only trusted userids as members):

chgrp mediausr-local-bin-mplayer chmod 4110 usr-local-bin-mplayer

(note that only execute permission is required to run the binary; by removing read permission, you ensure that the binary cannot be forced to dump a core file, offering some protection against one form of attack which likely would no longer succeed, but once did, on several operating systems).

I hope that helps ...

-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Systems analyst Concordia University Instructional & Information Technology Montreal, Quebec, Canada ----------------------------------------------------------------------