I've just tried to replace by Fedora 8 with Debian 5. All went well until the first login, which failed with the message that /etc/gdm/xsession could not set mode 0700 on .gnome2-private because the operation was not permitted.

I suppose I could have started without Xwindow, but since I don't understand what was wrong, I couldn't have sorted out the problem if I had.

My .gnome2-private file, like all the home directory, had been preserved from my previous installation. That used Gnome version 2.20.1, while the new one uses 2.22.3. Would that have anything to do with it? Surely not, or upgrading would be a bit of a problem.

It could possibly be a permission problem, since the file was "owned" by a different OS. You might try renaming it to .gnome2-private-old and reboot. Many times, if a config file is missing, the system will create a new default file in it's place. If the xsession starts ok after that, you may be able to either edit your original file, or change the permissions on it.

One occasional source of trouble when switching distributions but keeping /home is that the new distribution may assign you a different user ID number, so that as far as gnome is concerned some other (possibly nonexistent) user owns the file. It's easy to do an `ls -l' and look at the permissions but overlook which user and group happens to own the file. Just a thought..

Why not try to zip up that folder and back it up, so that you don't lose it. Then, delete the folder and see if X will start without your old Fedora settings in place. If it doesn't work, you haven't lost your config folder, as you can simply unzip it.

Thanks for the replies. The solution had occurred to me; I just had an academic interest in knowing what was wrong. The permissions for .gnome2-private are the same for all the other configuration directories so, if that was the problem, it should have protested earlier. It's hardly the most important one: all mine has in it is Evolution's email information. I suppose "mode 0700" must remain one of Linux's little mysteries!

After doing some further reading (without getting a concrete answer), I think that this might be something caused by selinux. You might have to change the permissions of either that folder or some of its contents.