Ignore my question - I used chown jay:jay /home/jay/.* and it worked

I can now log in and out of the desktop with no problems or error messages and my all of my files on in my /home partition are loaded. Thanks for all of your help.

Jay

Chown is the tool I would use as it can do a lot of files, complete directories, at once.
Will recursively (-R) change the user owner to 1000 and the user group owner to 1000 for the directory defined.

So;
Would set all permissions in your home directory to you and your group.

I do this on installs such as this one that shares a /home partition with another install. As they are installed separately both primary users, with different names to avoid ~/.foo file conflicts, are designated as user 1000.

Running that command changes the files in my testing install from tom:tom ownership to 1000:1000 there. Running the same command in my sid install does the same thing for my sam:sam permissions.

So sam can open the /home/tom directory from here in Sid and own the files. When I log in to testing then tom can do the same in /home/sam.

In your case you could use your user name in place of 1000 if you want. I prefer the numeric id.

Well I am glad it works.

Feels good when things work out.

I'm pretty sure you're aware of this, but for the benefit of newcomers who may not know it I'm adding this reply. The UID for non-system users does NOT always start at 1000, although it does for all *buntu flavors and I believe for Debian as well.

However, Red Hat derived systems usually start the range at 500. I ran into this when copying files from my previous Mandriva installation over to my first Xubuntu system back in 2007.

And of course, internally all the file systems track ownership by the UID, not the name itself, which can be quite mystifying until one knows what is happening.

1 members found this post helpful.

Exelent point.

All Debian branch distros use 1000.

All RH based systems, including the ones from the Mandrake fork use 500.

I am not sure about Suse but assume it too uses 500.

2 members found this post helpful.

This is why the UID for my home folder was set to 500 - I used to run Fedora, and this was the cause of the whole problem. So by changing the ownership of all files and folders on my home partition to my username instead of the user ID - 1000, I should be able to avoid the problem in future if I ever decide to install a new distro and use the same home partition just as long as I use the same username.

Should NOT work just fine!

OUCH!!! Re-reading this in the morning I see that I didn't get your meaning last night and consequently gave you a totally wrong response.

It won't work in every case, because the files themselves don't have your name, just the UID. It will work if, and only if, your new OS uses the same UID for your name!

Specifically, the ownership is stored in the first inode of the file, as a binary number. This allows it to always occupy the same number of bytes regardless of the number of characters in the owner's name. You don't have to know these details to use the system, but they sometimes help in understanding what's going on in the background.