[SOLVED] weird xbmc launch problem related to drivers or some such thing

[caudata]

I'm using XBMC 10.1 with Kubuntu 10.10 and part of the requirements for using XBMC is nvidia hardware acceleration (vdpau) using: libvdpau1 nvidia-185-libvdpau . My problem is if I use nvidia-185-libvdpau it causes my computer to freeze. I then installed the latest drivers from the nvidia website, libvdpau-dev, libvdpau1 everything is stable now but I can't launch xbmc from the kickoff application launcher. The catch is if I launch XBMC from commandline using "sudo XBMC" it will launch no problems. Now I understand how to get things to work under Linux often without understand how things interact and this is probably a case of that. I'm sure if I understood Linux more thoroughly I might know how to solve this part. Does anyone know what is going on here and how I might be able to solve this problem? The problem obviously has something to do with permissions.

If I try to launch XBMC from commandline without sudo I get this:

****@Kubuntu:~$ xbmc
NVIDIA: could not open the device file /dev/nvidiactl (Permission denied).
XBMC needs hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering.
Install an appropriate graphics driver.

Please consult XBMC Wiki for supported hardware
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Supported_hardware

Thank you for any help that can be provided.

cheers,
caudata

[caudata]

Re: weird xbmc launch problem related to drivers or some such thing

Ok it was a permissions problem and I had to issue the following commands:

# chmod 666 /dev/nvidia0
# chmod 666 /dev/nvidiactl