[Discuss] Linux Mint Cinnamon Home Permissions

[willrico at gmail.com (Will Rico)]

Thanks Bill!  I followed your advice, but didn't track down the 
culprit.  However, I did learn about the dpkg-deb command and looking 
for install scripts in the DEBIAN subdirectory after disassembling a 
package so some good came out of this.

Thanks again,
Will

On 12/11/2012 12:09 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 11:10 AM, Will Rico <willrico at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So my question is...How can updating a graphics driver change someone's home
>> directory permissions?
> The .deb file format allows for both pre & post install scripts
> (programs) to be run.   For what is probably some truly stupid reason,
> it is likely that something in one of those scripts changed the
> permissions on your home directory.   Any time you install a new
> package, you are running those scripts as root.   This is why using
> PPA's as sources for packages or even worse random web sites should be
> approached with some caution.
>
> As for your particular circumstance, I can only suggest you try to
> take apart the .deb file that you just installed to figure out exactly
> what happened.   A copy should still be in the /var/cache/apt/archives
> directory.   You will probably have to use the ar, tar, and gunzip
> commands in various orders to do so and through the resulting files to
> figure out what happened.   You will have to debug the program
> (script) to figure out what happened.
>
> Good Luck,
> Bill Bogstad