Mandrake 10 was working fine yesterday and then this morning i booted up and it gives me this error. It says the KDE can't write to home directory. In exact words:

The folowing installation problem was detected while trying to start KDE: No write access to $home directory (/mnt/windows/downloads) KDE is unable to start

And then it kicks me out of mandrake and I can login with a different GUI, but none of them work with programs inside and the error still comes up no matter what GUI I use. However, ICEWM does actually let me get into mandrake, I just can't do anything once I'm in. I know that it can't write to /mnt/windows/downloads because it's a NTFS partition and NTFS parition don't allow that for security, but why is that my home directory?? and is there a way to change it?? I appreciate the help. Thanks in advance.

Mandrake 10.0
Windows XP dual boot
2.8 intel p4
512 RAM
200 gb

that's a weird one.........

can you login as root or get to a DE & do things as root? if so, try this........... open Konqueror as root (from a terminal, su to root & type konqueror (enter). enable view of hidden files & directories (click "view"->"show hidden files"). in your /home/(you) directory look for the hidden /.kde folder. rename it /.kdeold, then try logging into KDE. that hidden folder stores all personal KDE settings, configs, etc. when you restart it will rebuild the folder. if it works, you can then copy & files from /.kdeold into the new /.kde folder to get back various desktop settings, menu's, etc. if you find that after you copy something & the problem occurs again, then you've found the culprit.

or, in lieu of that, again login as root, right click your users /home directory, go to the permissions tab & change owner/group to you(user) & also check the apply changes to all subdirectories box.

post back if either of those worked. try the second suggestion first, though.

otis

I tried both of those and the same error comes up. I failed to mention another error that mentions:

There was an error seting up inter process communications for KDE. The message returned by the system was: count not read network connection lost /mnt/windows/downloads/.dcopserver_localhost_0 please check that the dcopscpucp program is running. It's really hard to read because the font is really fuzzy. I don't know what the problem is. This is the second time I have had problems with mandrake 10 and windows xp on the same hd with a dual boot setup. is the problem mandrake?? should i try a different release?? I would say that it is my fault because I don't know mandrake very well, but i didn't do anything....last time it worked and now it doesn't....i don't know...thanks for help

Hi bond82, I exactly had exact same problem with you.

-No write access to $home directory
-count not read network connection lost /mnt/windows/downloads/.dcopserver_localhost_0


And believe it or not, if I hadn't see your post, I would have
re-install everything from scratch again..

I noticed that you said ICEWM still worked under the
circumstances, so I used that to gain control.

here is my case :

I edited my username's home directory(silly mistake I know)
and then terminate my session (this is when all things went wrong)

so after read your post, I entry using ICEWM , went to
the control centre and change the home directory to
the initial state and voila problem solved

just try to remember what did you change/edit/configure
last time berfore things when wrong

but then again by this time you probably had the problem fixed.

THX

Hi.

I've never used this forum, so I hope the format I'm writing in isn't inappropriate.

I've been searching google for the problem I've been having concerning the first post on this subject, however I have been unsuccessful in finding a cure for my kde.

I can't see to "chown user.user /home/user" even from root. And root is the owner of the /home/users ..

Any idea what I could do?

I used to use only Linux, but i haven't used it for over 3 years and have forgotten quite a lot of things about possibilities and ways of doing things.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Nasim

I could not access my normal home account, with both of the errors above.

I could get into the root account in kde and into different user account.
I fixed the problem with:

chown -R --reference=/other_partition/myfile /home/myhome

Logged back into my user account. Works well.