Hi everyone

Im having trouble sharing mp3s between two users on my laptop. I have two log ins, (users) for myself. The main login has all my MP3s on it. The second does not. I want to be able to play my mp3s from either login.

I have gone in to my main folder called MP3s, and set the sharing permissions to shared, and it appears to have set it for the main folder. I also opened the MP3 folder and set the permissions
on each sub folder to shared, which shows a shared icon above each sub folder.

When I switch users, I cant find my music. I went back in a copied a few of the files to the public folder under my main log in. but that did not work either.

Im running the latest version of Ubuntu and it says it is up to date.

I will appreciate your suggestions and help

Thanks

Vanessa

Woh, this is an unusual problem (if I am actually understanding the problem correctly).
First, you really have two logins for yourself? Well, I suppose you have your reasons for that... Both logins are in the same computer right? Not working on a network/etc, right?

Well, being the case, I can't see why you wouldn't be able to play your mp3 (read the files) by any user. You might have the permissions of your "main" login name's home directory to be 700 (rwx <- read, write, execute for the user and 0, 0, or cant' do anything, for everyone else) set. So, even if you change the permission of one of your directories inside your home directory, you wouldn't be able to read it anyway (being that you can't in fact get into the directory your mp3's are). Let's try something:

If you don't work with more people in the computer you have these two logins (you only have two login names), login as your "main" login name and :
That should be it. Now logout, login with your other user name and you will be able to access your other user name's dir, and listen to your mp3. You could:
to make a link to that directory, so you can access that directory directly from the home directory of this other user name.

This problem is a fairly straightforward exercise in file permissions. I hope that this isn't homework from school.

Given two user accounts named a1 and a2, and given that a1 creates and stores mp3 files in a subdirectory of its home directory and owned by it, we want to allow a2 to read the files in a1's home directory. This can be done using the common characteristic of each account; the group membership. Both accounts belong to the user group named users. Any file that is created by either account is also owned by the "users" group. Typically the home directory of user accounts is also owned by the "users" group. So the answer is to modify the permissions of the files to allow the group that owns the files to read them. Usually this is already permitted in a default installation. The system setting that controls the file permissions that are assigned to a file when it is created is called the umask. It represents the opposite of the file settings that you want. The thing that is probably getting in your way is that the home directory of the a1 account probably does not allow the "users" group members to look into that directory. So here are the steps to remediate this.

Assuming that the user accounts have their home directory at /home/a1 and /home/a2 then check to see if the members of the "users" group are allowed to see into the home directory of account a1. The required permission is execute in order to see into a directory. Generally you will also assign read permission to a directory that an account should be able to see into.
If you need to change the permissions you can use the chmod command to do that.
Then do the same for the /home/a1/mp3 directory.
Now do the same thing for the files in the mp3 directory.
Now create a link in the /home/a2 directory that points to the /home/a1/mp3 directory.
Naturally you will need to use a user account that has permission to do those things. The root account will work for that purpose. You can log into the root account in Ubuntu using the sudo -i command.

Thank you both for your quick answers. I followed stess junkies directions and they worked perfectly.
I dont have a clue what all that means, but it works great.

Thanks again

Vanessa

PS no this was not a homework assignment. Im really paranoid about surfing the net, so I have a fake user
setup just for that.

If you'd like to post more details about this you might be able to get a better understanding. I'm guessing that you did something like giving permissions to /home/user/music where you could access ~/music and subdirectories and files but had a problem navigating to it.

Users might have access to the folder /home/user/music but not be able to navigate to it because they do not have access to /home/user. Think of it as a tree with infinite branches where you open up a twig but it's lost in the branch that only the original user can access.

Many people use /usr/share for this so as not to expose their whole home directory to everyone but I often open up /home and use that as a shared directory for music and videos, etc.

My theory could have been tested by typing the full path even though you couldn't see it.

I'll monitor this thread in case anyone posts...

Steve

If you would like more information about file permissions the RUTE on line tutorial is a good place to start.

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://rute.2038bug.com/node17.html.gz

I am glad to hear that this is not a homework assignment. I have the same configuration in my Internet machine. One account uses web browsers and other Internet software. The other account has personal information. I think it is a good idea to separate your files into two accounts like this.