Debian is great, as long as I'm logged in as root. Once I log in as a user, nothing works. Certainly nothing works by default.

I am constantly having to track down, and change, various permissions, for every application: xmms, gxine, firefox, etc.

I have xmms working (I think). Gxine sort of works, but I have to go through the configuration setup everytime I run it.

I thought firefox was working, but it's not working now. Now I get this error.

"Could not set mode 0700 on private per-user gnome configuration directory `/home/walter/.gnome2_private/': Operation not permitted"


Again, everything works fine if I'm logged in as root. I have to wonder if it's productive to be so insanely restrictive with user privilegeds. I wonder how many people do the same thing as me, and just bypass the entire headache by logging in as root all the time.

I think that most people will look at it from a diametrically opposite direction. The "insanity" is working as root.

I suspect that you are trapped in a vicious circle. You work as root so everything you do is given only root permissions. If, as root, you create a directory in ~/user then that directory will belong to root and user will not be able to access it.

Suggestion: set the ~/user directory to owner: user and group: user, include all subdirectories and files. Most of your problems will go away.

>>I suspect that you are trapped in a vicious circle. You work as root so everything you do is given only root permissions.<<

Well yes, but I can't really do anything administratively as a user. As I user, I can not add software, or update, or upgrade. I have limited ability to create directories and the like. As I mentioned, as a user, it is difficult for me to even run user apps. So, of course, all of the admin work I do will be as root.

>>Suggestion: set the ~/user directory to owner: user and group: user, include all subdirectories and files. Most of your problems will go away.<<

I already set permission to 777. I can not seem to change the owner. I have tried:

chwon -R username ~/user

But, I just get a long series of messages like this:

chown: changing ownership of `/home/user': Operation not permitted

One thing I forgot to mention in my original post. My /home directory is FAT32. I dual boot, I wanted to able to access my files either OS. Could that be the problem?

You will need to change the ownership to the user as root if the current owner is set to root. From there, see how you go as the user.

Sorry I forgot, bu note davcefai's point about changing the group as well, or you may have problems.

I'm on Fedora, but use something like

chown -R username:group /home/username

IIRC, vfat doesn't allow you to set any file access permissions, so it makes a poor file system choice for /home. If the use of vfat is absolutely necessary, then it would be much better to set a separate vfat /data partition for data files.

I've mounted vfat file systems (floppies, usb-thumbdrives) with options "user,umask=0" and I've had no problems accessing those vfat files.

Sorry - missed the FAT32 comment - even on a re-read it took me a while to find it.

What doe IIRC stand for?

If I Recall Correctly

FAT32 accounts for it, in my opinion.

This is how I am set up:
My HOME directory is on an ext3 partition. Stuff I want to access from Windows (which is nowadays very little) is in a /user directory on FAT32.

The problem is that all those initialisation files and folders in your home directory have to be owned by the user. That's only possible on an ext partition.

Here is my setup: my entire /home directory is fat32. Within that /home directory, I have user directories, and a "public" directory - all accessible from samba. I kinda like having /home/user directories easily accessible from the windows side, but I can live without it.

But how do I put my user directories in my linux (ext3) partition, without having to re-partition my drive?

I suppose I could login as root, umount my /home directory and name it something else. Then create a /home directory in the ext3 partiton, and move the user acounts over to that new /home directory. Should I change the run level if I do that?

What woudl I have to change?

- Samba
- /etc/fstab

What else?

Also, should I try to move the user accounts, or just delete the accounts (saving whatever data, of course), and then re-create the accounts?