New installation Jaunty constant permissions problems

[John L Vifian]

On Tuesday 19 May 2009 4:20:20 pm steven vollom wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 May 2009 01:22:02 pm John L Vifian wrote:
> > On Tuesday 19 May 2009 9:44:03 am steven vollom wrote:
> > > I just installed Jaunty fresh again.  I changed all my mounting points
> > > putting all partitions in the /home partition excepting root and swap. 
> > > I did perhaps make a mistake by mounting my /home parition as
> > > /home/steven and believe that may be the reason I am having permissions
> > > problems.
> >
> > Could you be more specific about what sort of permission problems you are
> > having?
>
> In one instance digikam would not allow me to do much, because of lacking
> permissions.  Ark refused to allow me to use it because of permissions.
> Certain folders that I created did not allow me to delete irrelevant data
> due to permissions problems.  e-Sword would not open due to permissions. 
> Those are the ones I remember, but it happened just about every time I
> tried to do something.  

OK in your first post on this subject you said you were trying to change 
permissions on  /home/steven/.kde/share/config/arkrc which is a configuration 
file used by Ark.  Presuming that you haven't gotten the permissions changed 
yet, we can work on it.

First in a terminal run:

ls -l /home/steven/.kde/share/config/arkrc

this should give you a line something like this presuming that your later 
claim is correct that the files are currently owned by root.

-rw------- 1 root root 2371 2009-04-27 11:06 
/home/steven/.kde/share/config/arkrc

except all on one line. ;-)  You also may want to run info ls first to 
understand what you are doing.

The parts of this info that we are concerned about are the bits: "-rw-------" 
and "root root" .  If the part where I have "root root" is  currently "steven 
steven" then that is what it should be and you don't need to change it. If it 
is anything else then change it with the chown command:

sudo chown steven:steven /home/steven/.kde/share/config/arkrc

Now run:

ls -l /home/steven/.kde/share/config/arkrc

and see if it has changed.  if it has then you can use dolphin (without sudo 
or kdesudo) to change the permissions so that it is readable and writable by 
the owner if necessary.

if it hasn't changed then you have other problems, but let us know either way 
what happens each step of the way here.


John Vifian
-- 
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are 
putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Mark Twain