No permission to run glxgears under nvidia

[Dale]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2005 at 01:06:30AM +0100, Alexander Volovics wrote:
> I installed the nvidia-6629 driver for x86_64 on a amd64 pc today
> using the nvidia installer and put the /dev/nvidia* devices in
> /etc/udev/devices/ correctly.
> 
> X starts up fine and everything is OK but when I try to run glxgears
> I get the well known message:
> 
>  Error: Could not open /dev/nvidiactl because the permissions
>  are too resticitive.  Please see the FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
>  section of /usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/README for steps
>  to correct.
> 
> Is the 'solution' suggested in the FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS section
> of the nvidia README still relevant in the udev era.
> (namely: remove line from /etc/security/console.perms starting with <dri>).
> 
> Shouldn't this problem be resolved by 'chowning' /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*
> to root:group and adding the user to this group, and maybe changing
> some permissions too.
> 
> Or does this entail some other changes elsewhere when using udev.

The udev-era solution that I used (as I didn't mind the security
implication of world access on this particular system) was to create
a local file (thereby not conflicting with distributed files) called:

    /etc/udev/permissions.d/50-local.permissions

which contains the single line:

----------------------------------------------------------------
nvidia*:root:root:0666
----------------------------------------------------------------

The order of reading files in directory /etc/udev/permissions.d/ is
such that the "nvidia" line in new file
    /etc/udev/permissions.d/50-local.permissions
overrides the "nvidia" line in the distributed file
    /etc/udev/permissions.d/50-udev.permissions

Your suggestion of using a special group is probably a better way,
in which case
    /etc/udev/permissions.d/50-local.permissions
would (for some "group") have a line similar to:

----------------------------------------------------------------
nvidia*:root:group:0660
----------------------------------------------------------------