I apologize if this is a dumb question, but I've been searching the forum and the web and I haven't been able to figure it out.

I just upgraded from Fedora core 5 to 10 with the netinstall disk. The installation all went fine and most things are working. Whenever I try to run X in a user account, I get an error that the log file can't be accessed. After messing around for a bit, I figured out that everything works just fine if I log in as root.
The user problem seems to be read access to the /var directory. I can cd to the directory but if I try to list the directory contents I get a cannot acces . permission denied error. I've tried chmod as root on the var directory to 777 and still none of the users are able to read the contents of the var directory.

Any help/suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks!

A lot of tools have changed in the range of Fedora 3 up to 7 (including the switch to Xorg). Upgrades usually keep configuration files intact, and it is possible that some of these configuration formats are not what FC10 expects. Upgrading Fedora version by version would have take longer, but is known to work correctly in most cases.

Most files and directories in /var are supposed to be owned by root. Maybe you should remove the current X installation and install it from scratch. This can be tough to remove, though, due to the many dependencies.

linux

Many of the log files under var are restricted to root by design. I suspect even if you change the permissions, they may get changed back as the log files are updated.


Even though you changed the directory permissions, the existing file permissions do not change. Directory permissions and file permissions are not the same thing.

Upgrade? Good $DEITY. I spose there's too much change between FC5 and F10 for it to upgrade perfectly...


Exact message please?


Ah, but the root account ain't for performing regular unprivileged user tasks...


(extended) directory permissions ('ls -alZd /var/log')? In the event nothing works a mass file relabelling might help if it's due to SE Linux, but first please check /var/log/audit/auditd.log for AVC messages (or sealert in /var/log/messages).


HAL sez: don't do that Dave...