Hi .... i juz installed madrake linux a few days back ... im not able to log onto kde from my normal user ...only if i log in as root im am able to get into kde .. it gave some error as not able to find some running process ... i looked up the ownership of /home/arjun... Owner and group were both root ...When i tried changing this to arjun while logged in as root ..it said i dont have nescessary permissions to do so ...Plz help

ok seems strange.

try this logged in as root

chown -R arjun /home/arjun
chgrp -R arjun /home/arjun

give console output if you can as well

hey ...i tried the command while logged in as root as u said .... it said : " Operation not Permitted" for all the files and subdirectories in the directory ...
Same thing happened for chgrp as well

give me the exact output of
ls -l /home

another thought. as root can you cd to /home/arjun

As for your Second q ..yes i can cd to /home/arjun
And this is the output of ls -l /home
total 12
drwxrwxrwx 10 root root 4096 Sep 5 22:20 arjun/
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 Sep 5 01:00 Recycled/
drwxrwxrwx 3 root root 4096 Sep 4 14:08 simba/


one more thought ...both the directories arjun and simba are in a local disk of type fat32 ... ie only those directories i access from /home are in fat 32 ..... might this be causing the problem ? .... if so what do i do ?

It definitely DOES cause the problem.

Having ANY linux files residing on FAT is VERY poor
practice for varied reasons. If you have no way of
changing the file-system (which you REALLY should)
to something more linux, like ReiserFS or ext2/3, try
changing the fstab entry for the partition to match your
user-id, e.g.
/dev/hda2 /windows vfat user,rw,uid=<yourID>,umask=0002 0 0

However, I can't emphasise strongly enough that this
is a BAD IDEA.



Cheers,
Tink

hey tinkster love your work, you seem to be on almost every thread going!!

it does seem somewhat strange that the 'Recycled' dir is in /home.

i thought this was be user specific and therefore in each user directory..... no wait. that would be why. sorry scrap that.. just got back from the pub. quite slow.

you get 'Lost + Found' at the base of every fs and obviously for FAT32 'Recycled' there instead.

i personally can't really see any real reason why it should cause a problem that its on FAT32 drive but i guess the permissions could be causing a problem.

i don't like to trust anything microsoft so i'd never do what you have personally but how did you manage to set your home directories on another drive?

i like the classic have your home dir on the same drive and use whatever other drive to store all your data. much easier.
you might have something to say about that tink but thats my closed minded view. (only been using linux a couple of years and although have experimented a fair amount i get he feeling from what i've read by you in the past that you know your stuff so feel free to slate me)

peace

Heh - thanks for the kudos :}

Other mods are more active and/or more knowledgeable.

The problem is that FAT and/or NTFS have NO knowledge
of OR facilities to accommodate Linux ownerships/permissions.

The pseudo-perms and ownerships we see in a mounted FAT
partition are applied on boot, not inherent in the file-system.

Hence, if /home resides on a FAT partition ALL users homes
under that will have the same owner.


Cheers,
Tink

good point. very good point.

i think the leson there is just don't use FAT (unless your using it to share between windows and linux)

Thx for all the HElp ....how do i change the File system type? ..i have partition magic ..will that work ? should i format the drive ?

theres a few things you'll have to do tho.

firstly set your home dirs to be elsewhere. not sure how to do that.

then reformat the drive to ext3 or similar. Tink mentioned riserfs. its an option but its probably easier if you stick with ext3.

***Make sure you back up any data beforehand***

if its a new install and you've not done much to it yet i'd just reinstall rather than spend ages messing about

thanks pat and tink ....i reinstalled Linux and made the home directory mount off a ext3 partition ...works now .. Thx again