Just what is going on with .ICEauthority ownership?
 

Like many, I'm the victim of erratically shifting ownership of the my /home/username/.ICEauthority file. It frequently reverts to root. I've found many references to this problem relative to numerous distros.

I know how to fix the problem: change ownership of the .ICEauthority file back to my user.

But what makes the ownership go to root in the first place? I really, really want to resolve this, as it's driving me crazy -- or crazier.

i havn't had this problem cause i use xcdroast so what i say is hearsay from other discussions

it's kb3 run as root that does it
try running kb3 using sudo

Thanks for the reply, but I don't use kb3 at all. You've got me wondering if there's some other app that may be misbehaving this way, though. I often run Midnight Commander as su root. Maybe I need to use sudo instead.

I had this problem using xfce4 and I still don't know the cause.

Hmm. I run xfce4.2.x almost exclusively. Maybe there's something going on. Do you also have KDE installed? Because I was under the impression the .ICEauthority is first and foremost part of KDE, but maybe I'm wrong. I was even thinking of removing KDE altogether to get rid of this problem, but I like to have KDE for occasional use.

I had done a clean intall of Slack and xfce was the first DE/WM I had compiled. I had a .kde direcotry becuse I had saved my /home directory but this should not have caused a problem. Anyway deleting the .ICEauthority file solved the problem. When I searched on google I found out that some GNOME users have had similar problems.

Fixed? We'll see ...
 

Your replies got me doing some more systematic troubleshooting to see if some app that I was running as root was goofing up ownership of /home/username/.ICEauthority. I *think* I've narrowed it down to Krusader, which I often would run with sudo. Now, from what foo_bar_foo wrote, I would have thought that launching Krusader with sudo wouldn't pose a problem. But in fact it does seem to, at least with my current setup.

I noticed that when I would launch Krusader with sudo, a .DCOPserver file would be created in my /home/username directory and, invariably, the ownership of .ICEauthority in the same directory would subsequently change from username to root.

It appears that if I launch Krusader with kdesu instead of sudo, this doesn't happen. Or at least not so far.

Note that I'm not running KDE, though it's obviously installed. Instead, I generally run xfce4, but I do use a handful of KDE apps from xcfe.

I'll keep my eye on it and see. Thanks for your suggestions, which seem to have led me to a solution. I think.

Since I didn't make it clear in my initial post, the reason this ownership change is so annoying is that it effectively prevents me from logging in to my desktop environment (either XFCE or KDE) as user. To do so, I have to log in as root and manually change ownership of /home/username.ICEauthority from root back to username.

this really sounds like a bug in kdelibs doesn't it
perhaps a bug report is in order

O.K., I just filed it. We'll see what happens. There seemed to be a few other insects in line ahead of mine.

I'll be interested to see what happens. I keep having this permissions problem on ICEAuthority happening, too, and it happens regardless of whether I use any KDE apps or not.

One problem is that the permission change isn't noticed until some application is called upon that needs to access ICEAuthority. By then it's too late to see what changed the permission back to root in the first place!

I only noticed it today when I decided to run a Gnome session (a rare thing for me). The Gnome desktop crashed because it couldn't gain access to ICEAuthority. I'll bet its ownership was changed to root long before that.

I have to change it about once a day. It would be nice if there was a panel in gkrellm that would light up and flash when the permission change occurred! :)