Problem with permisions running multiple distros
 

Hi, I just installed fedora 7 after running ubuntu 7 for some time. While setting up fedora, i manually mounted all my partitions in fstab successfully. But then i needed permission of my ubuntu partition so i changed the owner of the folder where i mounted it and all sub-files to my fedora user. Now when i try to log into ubuntu, i get an error about $HOME/.dmrc and $HOME directories not having permissions, among other permission errors. I tried changing those permissions back but it doesn't work. When i tried to change back the owner from fedora to my ubuntu user, it doesn't save the read/write option enabled. What do i do?!

Hi, and welcome to LQ!

The clean thing to do would have been to modify the fstab entry
to allow users to mount. Ideally you would also have made the
numerical ID of your user the same in both distros /etc/passwd
file ...

That all said: I'm not sure I understand the bit about the
What do you mean?


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks, um, i'll try to be more specific. Here's my unmodified fstab:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda8 swap swap defaults 0 0

and i added

/dev/sda6 /media/ubuntu ext3 defaults 0 0

is that right? Then in nautilus i went to the properties of /media/ubuntu and changed the owner of it and all subfiles to my fedora user (which is the same name as my ubuntu user). But before i changed it, it said the owner was "1000". hmm. And the read/write option was in the properties of the folder as well.
Thanks for the help!

So which mountpoint is /dev/sda6 under Ubuntu?



Cheers,
Tink

Fedora uses 500 by default while Ubuntu uses 1000. The best solution, as pointed out above, is to make sure that you have the same UID and GID on all of your systems. Setting all of them to 1000 works fine for me.

/dev/sda6 is my / partition in ubuntu. OK, from fedora i tried changing back the permissions of the ubuntu partition back to 1000, but it always freezes and doesn't finish. but i tried going back to ubuntu, i got to the gdm screen, logged in and an error appeared (it was there before)

session lasted less than 10 seconds ...

...
etc/gdm/Xsessions:Beginning session startup...
mkdtemp:private socket dir:Permission denied


is that helpful at all? and i checked out my user id line in /etc/passwd and they are the same in both.

thanks a lot!!!

thats actually

mkdtemp: private socket dir:

not :P

It sounds as if files in your /tmp directory are still using the wrong permissions. Run ls -l on tmp from the command line (you can boot to a command line by putting "single" after your bootline in GRUB). If certain files in /tmp have a number instead of a name as UID/GID, you need to change them to your proper UID/GID. On Debian, a proper tmp would look something like this:

drwx------ 3 jurgen jurgen 17 2007-08-06 03:00 gconfd-jurgen
drwxr-xr-x 2 tomcat55 nogroup 17 2007-08-06 02:59 hsperfdata_tomcat55
drwx------ 2 jurgen jurgen 19 2007-08-06 03:00 keyring-edjB2T
srwxr-xr-x 1 jurgen jurgen 0 2007-08-06 03:00 mapping-jurgen
drwx------ 2 jurgen jurgen 4096 2007-08-06 03:15 orbit-jurgen
-rw------- 1 root root 29 2007-08-06 02:58 sqlDY7jNh
drwx------ 2 jurgen jurgen 49 2007-08-06 03:00 ssh-sNUthz4566
drwx------ 2 jurgen jurgen 6 2007-08-06 03:00 virtual-jurgen.1AKCth

When you say they're the same I assume you mean that they
have the same name. The name (to the file-system and the
permissions) is meaningless. It's the numeric ID that
matters; if one was say 1000 and the other 501 you'd run
into that kind of issues.



Cheers,
Tink

alright, i finally got ubuntu to log me in. in fedora, i did
chown -R root /media/ubuntu
chown -R 1000 /media/ubuntu/home
but i'm pretty sure that ubuntu didn't appreciate that because while most of the system worked, i couldn't start some kde apps and my network didn't work at all. oh well, i just quit and did a fresh ubuntu install on another partition. and on my /tmp the permissions were with my uid. thanks for all the help!!

OK but did that solve the issue you had with the shared partition? Did you specify a UID/GID of 500 during the install or are you bach where you started from?