[SOLVED] X permissions or reinstall

You can help me out one of 2 ways.

Way 1:
A reinstall beckons. I have a recent iso, and did the usual thing
<# dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdc bs=1M> with a usb drive because the cdroms I wrote with it wouldn't boot, although it loop mounts just fine. I have the live usb, and runlevel 3 on the system. Can I wipe, reinstall, and carefully get my data back in small amounts, and is there a link to how to do it? I know there's some things in the a/ group you can't reinstall, but I have the live usb for that. It's the setup after I'd be keen on.

Way 2:
I've restored a backup after some messing, now finally booting OK, but I've been dogged by permissions errors every step of the way. My users got gid 1000 instead of gid 100 so everything was awol until I sorted that out. Some essential files (passwd, sudo, shadow stuff) were missing. I got in and reinstalled them, set passwords, and could log in. Nobody could sudo until I reset that. So everybody has runlevel 3.

Root's version of xfce4 is unspeakable (it always was, because I never bothered). Users have had a succession of errors
<Can't open /dev/tty0> <Can't open /dev/tty7> Loosening perms gets me in until a reboot if I do it for tty, tty0, & tty7.

That doesn't solve it, because it won't read /dev/input/* so I have no keyboard or mouse in X. I have to power off. In the logs it complains about hostname, but /bin/hostname is there, 127.0.0.1 is set to localhost in /etc/hosts and X & Xorg are set to 4755 in /usr/bin. I had struggles with ~/.serverauth.* ?& ~/.Xauthority, but I won there. It seems my last backups were not up to scratch. The last decent backup was 06-2019. The later ones are messed up in some way. I compared the groups user 'live' is in on the live usb, and the groups my users are in. My users are in more groups, and all that live is in, and they have less permissions.

Can anyone throw me a bone?

Originally Posted by business_kid You can help me out one of 2 ways. Way 1: A reinstall beckons. I have a recent iso, and did the usual thing <# dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdc bs=1M> with a usb drive because the cdroms I wrote with it wouldn't boot, although it loop mounts just fine. I have the live usb, and runlevel 3 on the system. Can I wipe, reinstall, and carefully get my data back in small amounts, and is there a link to how to do it? I know there's some things in the a/ group you can't reinstall, but I have the live usb for that. It's the setup after I'd be keen on. Way 2: I've restored a backup after some messing, now finally booting OK, but I've been dogged by permissions errors every step of the way. My users got gid 1000 instead of gid 100 so everything was awol until I sorted that out. Some essential files (passwd, sudo, shadow stuff) were missing. I got in and reinstalled them, set passwords, and could log in. Nobody could sudo until I reset that. So everybody has runlevel 3. Root's version of xfce4 is unspeakable (it always was, because I never bothered). Users have had a succession of errors <Can't open /dev/tty0> <Can't open /dev/tty7> Loosening perms gets me in until a reboot if I do it for tty, tty0, & tty7. That doesn't solve it, because it won't read /dev/input/* so I have no keyboard or mouse in X. I have to power off. In the logs it complains about hostname, but /bin/hostname is there, 127.0.0.1 is set to localhost in /etc/hosts and X & Xorg are set to 4755 in /usr/bin. I had struggles with ~/.serverauth.* ?& ~/.Xauthority, but I won there. It seems my last backups were not up to scratch. The last decent backup was 06-2019. The later ones are messed up in some way. I compared the groups user 'live' is in on the live usb, and the groups my users are in. My users are in more groups, and all that live is in, and they have less permissions. Can anyone throw me a bone?

I won't much help at all for the USB boot problem. (Sorry...) I have some questions below, though.

Have you tried hitting X11 with "kill -15" from a virtual console session? It's supposed to do a clean X server shutdown which you could then follow up by doing a shutdown from the console.

GID 100? I've never seen that used for non-privved user account. I've always started assigning GIDs starting at 1000.

Caveat: The following are what I see on an openSUSE system; I can check in a little while on my Slackware laptop though I cannot imagine the differences to be major.

I can't recall having the mouse not be recognized. The permissions for the mouse on my system are:

# cd /dev/input
# ls -l mouse*
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 32 Mar 13 17:27 mouse0

For X11/Xorg:

# cd /usr/bin
# ls -l X
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       4 Jan 29  2019 X -> Xorg
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       1 Jun  7  2018 X11 -> .

[snip]

-rws--x--x 1 root root 2394296 Jan 29  2019 Xorg

I seem to recall that my non-privileged user account had to be a member of the "video" group to run X Windows.

For the ttys, I see:

# cd /dev
# ls -l | grep tty
crw-rw-rw-  1 root tty       5,   2 Mar 25 16:55 ptmx
crw-rw-rw-  1 root tty       5,   0 Mar 13 17:27 tty
crw--w----  1 root tty       4,   0 Mar 13 17:27 tty0
crw--w----  1 root tty       4,   1 Mar 25 16:55 tty1
crw--w----  1 root tty       4,  10 Mar 25 16:27 tty10

[snip]

crw--w----  1 root tty       4,  61 Mar 13 17:27 tty61
crw--w----  1 root tty       4,  62 Mar 13 17:27 tty62
crw--w----  1 root tty       4,  63 Mar 13 17:27 tty63
crw--w----  1 root tty       4,   7 Mar 13 17:27 tty7
crw--w----  1 root tty       4,   8 Mar 13 17:27 tty8
crw--w----  1 root tty       4,   9 Mar 13 17:27 tty9

If I'm logged into one of the virtual consoles (say, /dev/tty2), I show up as the owner of the device (as I should).

It's weird that your backup didn't include those critical files. Did it run as a user other than root at the time? (Even if it did, though, everyone has read permissions to files like "passwd" so I would have expected that one to be available for restore.)

Are you using the nVidia proprietary driver? I'm wondering about a kernel driver mismatch and rebuilding it is needed. If some files for sudo, shadow, etc. didn't get backed up, could something related to that driver also not have gotten been backed up? (Ignore this if booting to level 3, logging in and running startx actually works.)

What if, now that you have a somewhat restored system up and running, you just ran the setup again to re-install the graphical desktop environment? It might correct the permissions problem.

HTH...

Updates:

Slackware does a few thing differently than openSUSE. Permissions on the Xorg binaries are "755". Slackware has a symlink (/dev/mouse) that points to /dev/input/mice (openSUSE doesn't; different distribution team decisions, I guess). tty permissions are the same. I'm not sure what those differences indicate. (Both are from working systems.)

Rather than always have the doubt whether you've caught everything that might be wrong and corrected it, I think I'd backup your user/users' data, bite the bullet, do the reinstall, and restore user data. Hopefully and third-party software and/or Slackbuilds will be easy get back online. And figure out what went awry during those backups.

I'm going for the reinstall. I'll get it in somehow. I grabbed a new dvd last night.
Slackware starts it's groups at 100, a lot start them at 1000. It worried me to find GID 1000 around the place. I frankly don't know how it got there, but I'll be a little more careful in future. So next is a barebones install onto blank partitions. I'm ok for amusement here as I have this Raspberry Pi.

The Keyboard/mouse errors were at /dev/input/input* I gather it hadn't even processed them to see what the devices were, so I saw errors like /dev/input/device2. The laptop actually has 2 keyboards (builtin & usb) and 2 mouses/mice/meece (trackpad & usb); Neither work. I have 3 kernels on that system. All of them boot, but all of them give issues.

So if your kernel is ok, if your permissions are set correctly, what's left? Something impenetrable like dubious /sys errors, or some weird /proc values that have nothing obvious to do with anything. Or something else - I don't care. You're off the roadmap anyhow. I'll try burning a dvd with the latest Current and see how that goes.

Solved - with a reinstall, under way ATM. So my copy of Current-Feb-04-2020 was corrupt. It wouldn't burn a bootable dvd, and who knows what else was wrong with it. I'm installing current-24-Mar-2020 via a dvd. Just looking at all that stuff as I was choosing it, there's so many things that seem to do jobs in the background that none of us know about except the line or two in the description. I have a fair archive of packages and sources, and a couple copies of data. The only challenging thing I really want to get back is my tweaked setup for xfce4, which was actually very nice, and difficult to set up.

Some of the utilities I took off will stay off until I want them - like Dicom viewers, and FreeCad stuff

Originally Posted by business_kid I'm going for the reinstall. I'll get it in somehow. I grabbed a new dvd last night. Slackware starts it's groups at 100, a lot start them at 1000. It worried me to find GID 1000 around the place. I frankly don't know how it got there, but I'll be a little more careful in future. So next is a barebones install onto blank partitions. I'm ok for amusement here as I have this Raspberry Pi.

I guess I hadn't caught the UID >= 100 default on Slackware. To avoid NFS permissions issues, I've been keeping them the same (1000+) across all 'ix flavors. (One day, I'll roll out LDAP.) I have a couple of Pis that I use as dedicated services on the home LAN (Nginx proxy server, bind server, etc.). Nice little systems but I'd rather they came with a bit more RAM for use as a desktop system.

The Keyboard/mouse errors were at /dev/input/input* I gather it hadn't even processed them to see what the devices were, so I saw errors like /dev/input/device2. The laptop actually has 2 keyboards (builtin & usb) and 2 mouses/mice/meece (trackpad & usb); Neither work. I have 3 kernels on that system. All of them boot, but all of them give issues. So if your kernel is ok, if your permissions are set correctly, what's left? Something impenetrable like dubious /sys errors, or some weird /proc values that have nothing obvious to do with anything. Or something else - I don't care. You're off the roadmap anyhow. I'll try burning a dvd with the latest Current and see how that goes.

Hmm... Scratching my head how those settings could have become so scrambled to affect a system that way.

Anyway... Good luck... With so many oddball problems popping up, a re-installation is likely what I'd wind up doing (after a bit of cussing and gritting of teeth) so I could get back to doing more important/interesting things. Hope it all goes smoothly.

Cheers...

It'd turning out to be a nuisance, but I'm chasing through it and sorting it. I ended last night installing xf86-input-libwacom:-o, because xf86-input-libinput depended on it and baled without it. Really?

My last 2 backups don't seem 100%, which is worrying, but there's a good one from 06-2019. I'm intending to grab the homedir from that today, and restore settings, & configs. Then update data from later backups.

I was looking at updating the Arm distro on my pi for recreation, but all that has taken a back seat.