pulseaudio and alsa on ubuntu 12.04 server

Question

I am running ubuntu 12.04server, and trying to get pulseaudio working. I followed the instructions at How do I run PulseAudio in a headless server installation?

At the moment, pacmd list-cards is reporting 0 cards, aplay will only playing sound when I run it as sudo, and running alsamixer as sudo also works, but running it as my user produces "cannot open mixer: No such file or directory"

As far as I can tell, this means the the kernel module for my sound card is in fact loaded. I have already tried adding my user to the "audio" group, but this does not help. The permissions on the devices in /dev/snd are all

crw-rw---T 1 root audio 116

I noticed on an ubuntu 12.04 desktop, that the file permissions are slightly different. On the desktop, they are crw-rw---T+ 1 root audio 116

My questions are

1) How do I get aplay to work without running it as sudo on the server

2) Is there anything special I need to do to make pulseaudio work at this point.

Answer 1

To get aplay to work, check the permissions on the device nodes in /dev/snd/.

As for PA, it should then work just fine.