Installed newer mandrake, but /home directory doesn't have write access anymore?!?
 

Ok, team...
I'm not a total noob here...my problem is as follows:
I had been running Mandrake 9.2, then decided I wanted to check out kernel 2.6 and especially kde 3.2, so I went for Mandrake 10 beta2. I was doing okay for the most part, except for havind problems with my mouse driver not wanting to give me scroll wheel functionality (using the Logitech Mouseman+ PS2 driver - that's excactly what I have) and that my SB Audigy card, although the ALSA driver loaded for it on boot was somehow not getting along with ARTS or something and I have had lots of sound problems. Vectordrake helped me get my sound running over in the Hardware forum.

So, along comes Mandrake 10 rc1, and I decide to upgrade, as I am contributing to development by identifying my issues through bugzilla, etc.

On my setup, my /home directory is its own partition of about 35gb and pretty much everything else is mounted under / on its own 35gb or so partition. I have two directories under /home, one for myself and one for my wife. so I have /home/nick and /home/lisa.

Now, the problem is that I formatted my / partition and installed rc1 and now when I boot and login to my KDE session, the /home/nick and all of its subfolders and files are read-only even though the permissions don't seem to be set that way when checked. I've even tried to chmod 666 or chmod 777 on the /home folder with no luck at all. This is frustrating for obvious reasons, if you want to save a document or edit a document stored there, you cannot save your changes! Problems abound.

I can't help but think there has to be a simple fix for this, but the obvious one to me (chmod as root) didn't help.

Anyone experience this upon upgrading your distro? I'm sure its possible this can happen with other distros as well.

(PS > I first attempted and "upgrade" install from beta 2 to rc 1 and that froze while copying files from the cd's, thus forcing me to wipe / clean and start with a fresh install)

I would assume that your new installation has left you with different uid and gid numbers for your users... as root try ls -l /home if the owners of the directories show up as numebrs, e.g. "501" or "1001" then that'll be the case. you can use usermod as root to set your current uid's to match those numbers "usermod -u 501 -g 501 nick" when you next log in (u = user id, g = group id), you should be able to get access. can't think of anythign else that would be causing this.

hmmm... that makes sense for the most part...

[root@localhost nick]# ls -l /home
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 21 lisa lisa 4096 Feb 19 12:21 lisa/
drwxr-xr-x 57 nick nick 4096 Feb 19 18:44 nick/

That's what I got when I ran it. I didn't change the names of the users and the desktop preferences such as custom backgrounds and app launchers in the KDE panel are as they were before, so it seems the associations are there at some level. What is the significance of the numbers in the results I got? The 21 and 57 mean something, what about the 4096?

When I go to the Mandrake User Administration tool, it shows nick as user id 502 and lisa as user id 500. neither of those match any numbers from that ls command.

What do you make of all that?