problem with Picasa, when switching users

[gollum1971]

Hi all....

This is only my second problem with Mint so I very happy with it so far...

Problem No 2

I have installed Picasa on my fiance's laptop for our new camera, And it works great.
But when I log into my own account, Picasa wont even start.
I get a message saying -

/dev/nvidia0 or /dev/nvidiact1 are not accessable. Picasa will crash if these files are not accessable. to fix this, as root, please run:
chmod 666 /dev/nvidia0 /dev/nvidiact1

When I do that, I get a message saying that /dev/nvidiact1 : no such file or directory

Please help !

Thanks

Aiden

[Boo]

It looks like you may not need both devices.

you could test this (or just provide more info) by listing them in both user accounts.
login as you and run:
ls -l /dev/nvidia*

login as your fiance and run:
ls -l /dev/nvidia*

there could be some other permission problem or config error for your account not to work but it just shows up with the one you listed.

[gollum1971]

Thanks for the reply Boo

I must admit I'm more than a little confused with it all.

Anyways, I did the test on my finance's account and here is the result

crw-rw---- 1 root video 195, 0 2007-07-24 17:48 /dev/nvidia0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 195, 255 2007-07-24 17:48 /dev/nvidiactl

Don't know if that makes any sense mind
I'll try my account in a min

And with my account

crw-rw---- 1 root video 195, 0 2007-07-24 17:48 /dev/nvidia0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 195, 255 2007-07-24 17:48 /dev/nvidiactl

Now with my powers of deduction I'm going to guess that both of the nvidia things are there and that I have a permission problem rather than a software/hardware one ?

Thanks again for the reply

Aiden

[Boo]

yes it is permissons.
they are set to 660 for both devices.
and like the error suggested you have to set them to 666.

looks like you did not use a sudo on the chmod or if you look carefully the last letter of the second device is a "l" (lower case L)and not the number "1" (one), and since the device with a 1 at the end does not exist the command fails.
run:
sudo chmod 666 /dev/nvidia0
sudo chmod 666 /dev/nvidiactl


BTW i use f-spot as my photo/camera tool of choice.