Previously I was running Ubuntu 7.10. I have since migrated to fedora 8 (probably for no good reason, but Ubuntu took a billion years (closer to 10 minutes) to start, and displayed no splash (as it normally does) for me to judge loading times of specific things. However, that is rather irrelevant. This little introduction brings us into my problem(s).
A) I have about as much knowledge of the terminal as a three year old.
B) I have migrated my home directory (which in a stroke of brilliance after my third re-install of ubuntu I placed on it's own partion) along to fedora and now I can't copy files over. Permissions don't seem to exists for these files (set to uid and gid 1000, which doesn't want to exist).

I have looked around on my own and tried to find a solution, but google and Unix MAN pages are not actually that helpful. How do I "own" these files (not as root, as my user)?
I need these files. If I don't get these files I basically fail my high school trimester.

You use the CHange OWNer program... chown

As root, run...
chown newusername.newusername -R /home/oldusername

That will set the user and group to the new user name for every file in /home/oldusername.

The problem is that the user ID is both a name and a number. Ubuntu and Fedora have given different numbers to the same name. The groups may have both different names and different numbers. So back up the /home/user tree someplace, login as root on Fedora, and try to fix the user ID number and the group names. You can probably fix the user ID number with the usermod -u command. You can probably fix the group number and name with the groupmod command using the -g and -n options. See:

man usermod
man groupmod

and you may also find the chown command handy.

man chown

You are probably better off to make the changes in Fedora rather than Ubuntu.

---------------------
Steve Stites

Awesome, but it doesn't work. For one thing the system did not make me a sudoer by default. I cannot run sudo.
So, how do I edit the sudoers file!? (/etc/sudoers right?)
Would that be the problem? When I ran chmod it return Permissions denied errors for every file,
and I assume sudo would solve this little problema.
I don't have a running Ubuntu right now. I overwrote the root directory with fedora.

You can even do it from the GUI. Here is how to do it in Fedora. Just log in as root and go to System > Admin > Users and Groups and make a new user and a new account, both 1000 as that is what Ubuntu uses by default. If you want to keep the same account and you just want to change the user ID and account ID to 1000, be sure to make a backup of the data in your home directory first. Also bear in mind that changing UID/GID (rather than simply creating a new user account) will leave certain files - particularly in /tmp and a few in /var - at the old 500 UID/GID. You would have to edit those manually.

Hmmm, so I can do this two ways: Login as root and then
a) Create a new user account to use for these files (or change my uid and break a few tmp or var directories)
b) Use the terminal to change the files in the directory.
Anyway to avoid the root login? I'm updating the system (I'm do everything at once, no patience) and would rather not logout.

The only way to change ownership and permissions on files is by having the authority to do so. Even if you own a file, you can not make it belong to another user.group as a regular user:

You HAVE to be root to do so, that's not an option, it's a requirement.

Regards,
SIMP

Fedora User

most distros use old school
su command

su
root's password:

root# chown -R newuser:users /home/olduser