Black flash of Death: Ubuntu 11.10

[Original Jigen]

Hey Everyone

I'm having the same problem I see a few others having, except so far I haven't seen anyone with this problem on Ubuntu 11.10.

It's the one where you tell Zsnes to open and it flashes black for a flicker then does nothing. My problem differs from the norm in two ways: 1) It also changes the resolution of the screen (which can be fixed with a quick restart), and 2) Zsnes worked just fine the first time I booted it up and I have changed absolutely nothing in between when I first started in up and now that I'm having the problem.

My system:
O/S (mentioned twice already but here it is for reference): Ubuntu 11.10 - 32-bit
Processor: Intel Atom CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz x2 (It's an old 10" eeepc)
Zsnes version: 1.51

Have I left anything out?

[paulguy]

Try executing zsnes from a terminal. Just open a terminal and type zsnes then press enter. Then copy and paste the output here.

[Original Jigen]

Here's what it came up with:

Use ZSNES -? for command line definitions.

Starting Mouse detection.
Unable to poll /dev/input/event10. Make sure you have read permissions to it.
Unable to poll /dev/input/event9. Make sure you have read permissions to it.
Unable to poll /dev/input/event6. Make sure you have read permissions to it.
Unable to poll /dev/input/event5. Make sure you have read permissions to it.
Unable to poll /dev/input/event4. Make sure you have read permissions to it.
Unable to poll /dev/input/event3. Make sure you have read permissions to it.
Unable to poll /dev/input/event2. Make sure you have read permissions to it.
Unable to poll /dev/input/event1. Make sure you have read permissions to it.
Unable to poll /dev/input/event0. Make sure you have read permissions to it.
ManyMouse: 0 mice detected.
Segmentation fault

You're going to have to forgive me. I'm an Ubuntu n00b so a lot of things are new to me. One thing that confuses me is that all of those lines tell me I do not have read permissions, I'm the only user on this machine I thought I had access to everything, but Ubuntu still gets snippy if I ever try to monkey with anything in File System. This confuses and annoys me somewhat.

[paulguy]

It's for security. You're not root.

As for what's causing that crash, it's not related to that, likely. However, I have no idea what it could be without a debug backtrace. I imagine this problem has come up, but I don't remember what the cause/solution was.

[rarity11]

I had the same problem, today and looking in some old threads and found a solution
open a terminal and type this
zsnes -ad sdl

the zsnes (btw i'm too stupid to learn the name of the emulator) should start, then change the resolution of the screen to a windowed mode and quit the emulator, that should start the emulator next time without any problem