PEBKAC 2008 ;) [was: Re: Stupid Ubuntu 8.10

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sat, 2008-11-08 at 19:33 -0500, vafa at aol.com.au wrote:
> the results that I sent you was after installing fonts. I installed
> that TTF-fonts folder by the command:
> 
> sudo cp -rp /usr/share/fonts/truetype
> 
> but why Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10 have different permissions?

All the -p did was to preserve the ownership and permissions as they
were. Since they were wrong after the copy, they must have been wrong
before the copy.

What seems to have happened is this (I'm only going to write about the
directory permissions, because they prevented you from changing into the
directory in the first place; applying the following to the file
permissions inside the directory is left as an exercise to the reader):
      * For some reason, the original directory (and ttf files inside)
        had wrong permissions and ownership.
      * Permissions (rwx------) and ownership (vafa.vafa) made sure that
        only vafa could access the fonts, but no other user. This did
        not matter as long as nobody but vafa tried.
      * When you made the original copy with -r , the permissions
        remained rwx------ (which is the wrong setting for a system-wide
        install), but the ownership was changed to root.root (which is
        the correct one for a system-wide install, but cannot work when
        the permissions are not correct)
      * To, the directory ended up as rwx------, root.root. Therefore,
        only root could access them. For vafa it failed.
      * Then you asked for help and I told you to use -p. This only
        ensured that everything was reset to rwx------, vafa.vafa.
        Which, as explained, is wrong for a system-wide install but
        happened to work for you by accident
      * Then you posted the ls output
      * Then I explained what to do to correct the settings in a way
        that is correct for a system-wide install, is secure, and works
        for all users, not only vafa

This being said, you should look into the link explaining OpenOffice
font installation that NoOp posted.

And thanks for fixing your mailer to keep the thread intact :)

Regards
Mario