Permission Denied to access graphics card

OpenGL Development JOGL Development
#1

I was trying to run a jogl application on a linux machine and got the following problem:

NV: could not open control device /dev/nvidiactl (Permission denied)
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.

Do I need to be root to access the driver? How can this be solved? I really need this to work on this machine, which I don’t have root access. Help, please :slight_smile:

#2

You could try the following:

cd /dev
chmod o+rw nvidia*

(gives read-write access to nvidia devices for others)
Hope it works, cheers!

#3

Thanks for the hints folks.

I asked around a few people here, and I was told that this was due to a bug in RedHat. It seems that there is a problem with users sharing same security policies (the first user that logged on the machine holds the access to the nvidia card, and any other user that tries access it, gets a “permission deined”). The solution is just to reset the machine, and be the first to log in :wink:

This is a public machine at a university, btw.

thanks anyway.