chmod 777 /*
 

hehe...
I haven't written in the newb forum for a while now, but I guess it's time to return...

the thing is - since I got this computer, I've been runnning as root, since most of my work was installing and configuring the computer.
Then, when I had really nice settings set as root, going back to my usual user ziggamon fel really bad..
so I figured - I'll copy everything in my root dir to my home dir, and things will be good, but they weren't.

I had permission issues since all the files were still owned by root....

so what I did was (and this is the really stupid part)
I ran chown -vR ziggamon .*
and
chmod -vR 777 .*

in the /home/ziggamon folder.
as a result, all of my computer is now owned by ziggamon, and is read/writable. this because .* also allows ../ and ../../ and so on, making my entire computer owned by ziggamon.

Another funny thing is that I still can't log in as ziggamon...
metacity won't start...

I doubt that there is some easy fix to this problem, however if someone had one I'd be reaaaaally happy!
Otherwise - let this be a lesson for all the newb out there not to think they're smarter than their computer, because usaually they aren't...

and the first thing I thought was that can't be good... ;) Sounds like it's time to backup what you can and start over...

well, it turns out I managed to reown most of the things to root, the root user works fine, and that's enough for me right now...