It also may be issues with udev permissions.

I have similar issues with Xorg snapshots.

$ grep -ni "null" /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules
168:KERNEL=="null",             NAME="%k", MODE="0666"

$ ls -l /dev/null
crw-rw-rw-  1 root root 1, 3 Sep 13 12:08 /dev/null

Although your problem may be something else because those should be the
defaults.  Try running

$ /sbin/udevstart

as root, to restart udev settings.

-Bryan

On 15 Sep 2005, Isaac Atilano wrote:
> It may be related to your groups.
> I run Gentoo and my user id is in the following groups: tty wheel floppy
> audio cdrom video games cdrw usb users. I can use /dev/null even though
> the owner of it is root:root.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> http://www.fastmail.fm - I mean, what is it about a decent email service?
> 
> ----- Original message -----
> From: bradyh at bitstream.net
> To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:15:42 -0500 (CDT)
> Subject: [tclug-list] Gentoo Problems
> 
> Just setup a new gentoo box and I'm running into permission problems.  I
> get an error when I log in as a regular user saying that I don't have
> permission to access /dev/null.  When I check.../dev/null is chmod 600. 
> I
> can get rid of that error by chmodding it to 666 but it changes back any
> time I reboot.
> 
> Also I can't run startx unless I'm either logged in as root or set my
> user
> to have group root.  But when I do that I can't start terminals in Gnome
> -
> it says "There was an error creating a child process for this terminal".
> 
> Anybody seen this before?
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> Brady
> 
> 
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