Have just had to reinstall Mint18 (because of stupidly clicking an "upgrade" button for an app and then losing almost everything when it did a full OS upgrade of a perfectly good install of it ) and am now having a few puzzling problems with the new install:

Before ditching (= overwriting) the last install I managed (with some difficulty) to get back into it via Recovery mode or somesuch and saved my Thunderbird profile with the excellent ImportExportTools Tbird add-on and my Firefox bookmarks etc as a .json file - and, of course, my whole /home/user directory - all to a USB hdd.
So I was able to, in theory, restore the Tbird profile and Ffox tabs etc in the new Mint18 install. Which I did.
But after lots of mucking around and headscratching etc :-S when the profile and tabs etc weren't showing up on my user desktop versions of the apps even though all the various directories etc were there in .thunderbird I found that the restored Tbird profile and Ffox tabs only appear if I start them both on the root desktop or as "administrator" in my user desktop.
How can I make them start as a normal user without having to start both Tbird and Ffox as "administrator" or as root??
I see that both their permissions show up in GnomeCommander as rwx------ - so do I have to change their permission setup perhaps?

And after installing the 4.12 kernel (the latest stable one) and doing the two upgrades from 18 to 18.1 and then to 18.2 I've now found that all the icons have disappeared from my /root desktop GUI. They were all there in 18 and 18.1 but now there is just a completely blank desktop - even when I try to put to put some app on the /root desktop it simply doesn't appear - yet all the app files are showing up in the /root/Desktop file - but they're just not showing up as icons on the GUI.
How can I get the set of functioning desktop icons back on the root desktop??
Or, maybe, how can I "revert" back to 18 or 18.1?

TIA penguin uplines :-)
Paul W

AMD FX4350 in on Asus M5A97 R2.0 m/b with 8G of RAM
Samsung 256G Vnand SSD for OSs
Various whirlygig "storage" hdds

You have to change the permissions of Firefox and Thunderbird.
chmod +x .....

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No - that (chmod +x ...) didn't do it.
I think there must be some more obscure permissions alteration that I need to do .
It's just a bit of a pain to have to enter my user passwd every time I want to run Tbird or Ffox - which still has to be done if "gksu" is put before the commands.
It's possibly something to do with my having had to run the ImportExportTools add-on in root to be able to get my full old "profile" back again - not so much happens when it's run from the user desktop - even though it says "Import Successful" and a brief burst of harddrive access shows, none of the saved directories etc show up in /././Mail.
In the root GUI much more USBhdd access happens - because of getting the full profile I spose rather than the truncated version that it does when run from the user Desktop.

I got round the problem of having no root GUI by just doing another clean install of the whole OS - and the 4.12 kernel again.
And making a mental note to not try to "upgrade" to 18.2 again !!
I think it may be that 18.2 uses a different display manager (LightDM??) rather than the MDM which 18 uses - I couldn't install from an 18.2 DVD when I tried - it would just freeze - possibly something to do with my having an NVidia vidcard.
But one slight advantage of this re-install is that it now has the NVidia375 driver installed and working - which is usually an almost insoluble problem - the proprietary driver gives slightly better graphics than Nouveau I think.

Go through systematically, checking permissions on $HOME/.mozilla, $HOME/.mozilla/firefox and $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/whatever-your-default-profile-is. Somewhere you'll find files with the wrong ownership and/or permissions. The files should belong to you, not to root, and they should be rw.

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Thanx muchly for that Hazel!
I'd figured out that it must be something to do with permissions - but I've never yet had to or been brave enough to fiddleaboutwith/change them!
Presumably one would do that from the root GUI/Desktop that I've now got working again - which had gone blankscreen in 18.2 . (Maybe that wouldn't happen again now that I've got the Nvidia driver running?? - but I won't chance that )
And I know that it can't be very "safe" to be running both Ffox and Tbird as administrator - probably much the same as running from root I would guess - though they both only seem to need my user passwd and not the (different) root passwd - I always make a practice of setting a root one different to my user passwd.

Have just opened /../../.mozilla/firefox/~.default and I see that I (= the "user") own all the approx 45 files there but quite a few of them have permissions other than rw.. (there are about 15 of those) - quite a lot are rwx.. and a few are rwxr-xr-x and a few others are rw-r--r--.

Do you mean that I should be radical/brave and change the whole lot to rw------??
I guess I could change them all back if it didn't work.

And I'm wondering: could I just rename .thunderbird and copy the various mailbox and msf (or whatever they are) files to a user-installed version of it??
Though I see on looking now that the mailbox files that I've seen before don't seem to be there - just a whole lot of json files.

There are three sets of permissions for a file: for owner, owner's group and world. If the files belong to you, only the owner's permissions are relevant. rwx makes the file executable by you; for data files the x makes no difference. None of this needs to be changed. I was thinking of bad ownership rather than bad permissions, but you now say that you own all these files.

I suggest that you park your .mozilla folder somewhere safe (for example change the name to mozilla-backup) and run the programs as if they were freshly installed. This should allow you to create fresh configuration files in your own name without losing the accumulated information. If you look at the files in an editor, you will see that they are all plain text in xml format, so you can always recover any actual information that you want to transfer back in. It's probably simpler than trying to fix whatever has gone wrong.

Please don't run Internet programs as root! That's terribly dangerous.

And read up about ownership and permissions. It's absolutely core to the way Linux manages security. You should never change the permissions on system files but you can experiment with your own.

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Stop running stuff as root and do not use a "root desktop"!

If you run a gui session as root, everything runs as root - your browser (!), your calculator, your weather widiet - everything. This is not recommended and (among other much more serious potential issues) causes exactly the type of problem you are having.

Take a step back, drop the windows (but I *am* the admin!) attitude, and do a bit of reading about priveleges separation and what the root account is for.

https://www.howtogeek.com/124950/htg...ystem-as-root/

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Thanx for that Hazel and descendant_command.
What you're saying, d_c, is exactly what I'm trying to get out of - I know that it can't be all that safe running both Tbird and Ffox as either admin or root - probably the same thing I would guess - = "superuser".
But ATM it's the only way I can get at all my emails, directories, addressbooks etc etc - and I do quite often find that I want to look up older emails. The full Tbird "profile", which ATM is only accessible from root, is about 1.5gig it seems .
My emails go back quite a few years now - probably to the time I ditched Fedora for Mint (FC14 I think it was) - when it (RedHat/Fedora), like straight Ubuntu, went to that stupid taskbar across the top GUI - Gnome3 I think it's called - I want the Start button at the bottomleft and a totally user-configurable desktop thanks! - which Mint gives me.

I think that the original problem is that the exported profile(s) from the now over-written/gone messed-up M18install wound up with root ownership for some reason or other - even though I'm fairly sure I did the export from a user GUI. I know that a few months ago I successfully exported/imported my complete Tbird profile on another install of Mint18 and that profile seems to be only user-owned and not root-owned like the one I'm now trying to import.
Have just tried to change the ownership of the saved profile in GnomeCommander as root but that hasn't yet seemed to solve the problem. Maybe I should mark the "Apply Recursively" box??. But I'm reluctant to dig myself into a bigger hole!

But I've just seen (from the root desktop - unsafe, I know !) that all the mailbox and msf files are in the saved profile on the USB drive - so the next step will be , as you suggest Hazel, to rename .tbird to something else (but recoverable if I need to!), do a fresh user setup of it, and then copy all the mboxes and addressbooks across to it.

And yes, d_c, I can't help having a winDoze "I am the admin!" attitude to it all - because I am - I was using it when msdos3 came on 2x 360K floppies (I've still got them and a working 5" floppy drive), XTreeGold was the first usable GUI app , and RAM cost 100bananas/meg - and one had to have a couple of sticks of it because the m/b's 640KRAM wasn't enough for 3.1. And one still needs to have winDoze7 occasionally - its chess program is better (graphically at least) than any linux one I've yet tried.
But I can see that I will have to figure out permissions now, I guess - it's good to be learning new things in one's old age they say !

1 hour later: success!!
I setup/installed a user desktop version of both Tbird and Ffox, copied all the Tbird mailbox and msf files into their (Mail) folder in the new user-login Tbird, copied abook.mab across, and changed various ownerships from root to user in GnomeCommander(as root).
Everything current is now there, fully accessible, and running fine from a user desktop login.
Ffox just needed to have its json backup file's ownership changed, as above, and it was fine too - had saved all my various open tabs in an entry in the bookmarks so they've all been restored now too.
So I don't need to do the superuser logins any more - was a bit worried about that - as d_c's reply confirmed.

Thanx to both respondents for your helpful comments - made me get a bit further into permissions and ownerships.

AAMOI: I successfully installed the Nvidia driver very early on in this Mint18 re-install process - as soon as it was up and running on the 4.4kernel - before doing the 500megs worth of updates and the 4.12kernel upgrade/install - my thinking being that it's only recently that the nvidia drivers have become so hard/almostimpossible to install.

Should just be a case of 'chown yourusername -R ~/.thunderbird'

Although, I would have thought that would just generate an error if the profile was unreadable, not ask for elevated priveleges when starting the application.

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Please mark this thread as solved using the thread tools. It's also nice to mark posts that you have found helpful by way of thanks.

File ownership and permissions are what make Linux so secure compared with Windows. They are one of the most basic Linux features. That's why it's important to understand them.

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Done .
And thanx again everyone!

This has been a good little learning experience for me - have at least learnt how to deal well with ownerships now - even though I haven't yet had to fiddle with permissions - will read up on them now everything is working OK.
I certainly didn't do any internet banking while I was having to run both the net apps as superuser !!

I guess changing the ownership in rootGnomeComm was just a graphical way of doing chown etc in an su terminal - which I would have done if necessary.
I'm not unfamiliar with commandline stuff - having written my own OS 30+years ago in Z80 machinecode for a microcomputer with a 255x191 screen that had audiocassette storage - when xx86s with 2x360K floppies or type4 MFM hdds were at unaffordable prices .
But generally I find I now prefer to do as much as poss at as high a level as I can - a few mouse clicks are much quicker and easier than using a terminal.

After having had to do these 3 re-installs one other thing has left me slightly concerned: I think that in future I might, as I used to do, overwrite a partition with 0s or 1s before any install or re-install - because after all: a "format" only changes a few bytes in the MBR and leaves everything in the partition just as it is - and a few settings have popped up that I'm fairly sure that I hadn't yet set on this particular install - makes me suspect that they were left over from the last install - though am not sure how this works on sdds - they mightbe/probablyare different than whirlygig hdds

Better go and run fstrim -v /