Last week when I booted my Slackware 10.1 machine, I was unable to startx, the problem being the system couldn't lock the .Xauthority file. Soon I realized that the reason was because my home directory was mysteriously owned by root. I su to root and chown back to myself, chgrp back to users and everything is apparently fine.

Ok now today, while logged in, I realize I suddenly became unable to write to my own Desktop. After a quick check, I discovered that not only my home and Desktop folders were owned by root, but also all the other users' homes. Everything else in my home was still owned by me, though.

The only thing I did as root was to ./configure, make and checkinstall MPlayer, which source was incidentally in a subdirectory in Desktop, which could be related to the fact that Desktop and home became owned by root, but I really have no clue.

Anyone knows why is this happening?

Thanks,

-alxnd

This is because you didn't take the default choices in checkinstall. It happened to me too. Now i use "checkinstall -y".