I think I messed up my permissions...
 

Until recently, I was running a dual boot system, with 1 40G HD. The first part, hda1, had winblows XP installed on it. Hda3 then had My Fedora Core 1 installed. Everything was fine, and I was coming up to speed on my Linux learning. I got all the things I needed to work working, and was finally able to dump winblows all together. Hooray for that!

But, after I used parted to turn my old fat partition into an ext2 ( I tried for ext3, and it said it did not support it yet...odd since it gives you the option to begin with). So, I pulled that off successfully. Then, I copied everything INSIDE my home directory over to the new ext2 partition, deleted the existing home directory in /, and mounted the new ext2 partition at /home.

The problem is, I was a little too hasty. I neglected to use the -p flag to keep permissions while performing the copy of /home's contents to the new partition. BEFORE I rebooted to make sure everything went well, I erased the original contents of my home directory on /. Is everybody following so far?

So, now if I log in as my regular user, not root, everything is FUBAR. I cannot start Evolution, Mozilla Firefox, or many other things. I have icons on the taskbar for Evolution, firefox, etc and clicking on them causes the program to TRY to start ( as can be seen by the icon for the program appearing in the taskbar for 20 seconds) and then fail with no messages. If I start them from a command line (ie typing "evolution") gives me:

-For evolution: get error something like "error setting mode 0700 on /home/jeff/.gnome2-private operation not permitted" NOTE: this is not the exact error message, as I am not at home to reproduce it, but it's close.

-For firefox: error message "no running window" or something, and then it does not start.


If I am logged in as root, or if I su to root and use command line, everything is fine!!! Problem is, I dont want to have to log in as root all the time!

So, can anybody offer a solution to this? If you need more info, I can ssh to my home from here and read any files you need, but I cannot start any X apps via ssh, so I can't recreate any of the error messages.

PLEASE HELP!!!!

and believe me, I'll NOT be so hasty in the future! Lesson learned...

Thanks,

You can use "chmod -R" to change the permissions on files through recursive directories. For example, "chmod -R 775 /home/me/whatever".

Log in as root and
chown -R jeffreybluml:jeffreybluml /home/jeffreybluml
oh, hang on, that's probably wrong. If you're part of the group "users", that should be
chown -R jeffreybluml:users /home/jeffreybluml
and then
chmod -R 755 /home/jeffreybluml
the -R makes the command descend recursively down into every subfolder. You can set the permissions to whatever you want. man chmod and man chown can tell you more.

The other thing is, did you remember to add the new partition to /etc/fstab? If not then you have no home folder to have write permissions in.

Thanks for helping folks...

Yes, I had added the new partition to fstab, no problem there.

I did the chown and chmod you suggested, but I wont know if it worked until I get home this evening and can start some X apps like firefox.

Unless somebody knows a way to test this issue via ssh...chime in if you do...

So, I'll check it out this eve, and post again if I am still having problems.

Thanks again everybody...

That's why I love linuxquestions.org!

Thanks folks, problem fixed.

I changed the group to jeff, rather than users, because I had no users group. Got home from work, logged in as jeff again and all was fine.

THANK YOU!