Permissions problems?

goldenratiophi · 01-10-2005, 04:43 PM

Hello, I recently set up Gentoo with FluxBox. Now, since the day I could comprehend human tongue mummy and daddy always warned about using Linux as root. Trying to heed their advice, I set up a user account. This said user account belongs to the following groups:

wheel,floppy,console,audio,cdrom,ftp,sshd,video,games,mysql,cdrw,apache,usb,users,
portage

However, my user experience has been a bit limited. For example, I can't make/modify any files anywhere, even in my /home/[user] directory. Most programs won't run unless I "su" first, even basic things like firefox&. Even under su, things tend to run very slowly. I have a 2 GHz AMD processor and 1G RAM, so I'm quite at a loss as to what the problem is. Can anyone help?

Specs:
Gentoo 2004.3
2GHZ AMD processor
1G DDR RAM
128MB nVidia Geforce 4 MX 440 (with the drivers installed and running properly)
WM==Fluxbox
ext3 filesystem for /dev/hda3 (hard drive)

I don't quite know what information will help here, so if you need anything else, please tell me what it is.

(Sorry, if I sound inexperienced. I'm a casual Linux user who when confronted with problems easily gets lost).

bulliver · 01-10-2005, 05:01 PM

Wow, that's really messed up...

Can you start with output of:

Code:

$ ls -l /home | grep <username> # ...and
$ ls -l /home/<username>

goldenratiophi · 01-10-2005, 05:13 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by bulliver
Wow, that's really messed up...

Can you start with output of:

Code:

$ ls -l /home | grep <username> # ...and $ ls -l /home/<username>

Code:

ls -l /home | grep miguel # :
drwxr-xr-x   2 carlos users 4096 Jan   9 18:19 miguel 

//carlos and miguel are users, miguel is what I'm logged in as.

ls -l /home/miguel:

total 0

bulliver · 01-10-2005, 05:22 PM

Well there's your problem...miguel's home directory is owned by carlos....
try "chown -R miguel /home/miguel"
also, 755 permissions on a home directory is no good...anyone can go in there and read your files! Try "chmod 700 /home/miguel"

goldenratiophi · 01-10-2005, 05:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by bulliver
Well there's your problem...miguel's home directory is owned by carlos....
try "chown -R miguel /home/miguel"
also, 755 permissions on a home directory is no good...anyone can go in there and read your files! Try "chmod 700 /home/miguel"

Thanks a lot! Everything seems to be in working order now!