[Discuss] Linux Mint Cinnamon Home Permissions

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

Most of these settings are stored in "hidden"  files in your home
directory.
An 'ls -al' will show you all your files, hidden or otherwise as well as
the permissions.
Once you determine that these files may have incorrect ownership, then:
'sudo chown -R <you>:<your group> .'
Should set everything back to the correct ownership.

-- Another test may be safer
1., become root using sudo ' sudo -s -H'
2. cd /tmp.
3. Check permissions and ownership of files in /tmp
4. reinstall the nvidia driver. Something like 'apt-get install
--reinstall nvidia'
After reinstalling, check the permissions and ownership in the /tmp
directory.
5. Restart X by logging out, and logging back in. Your home directory
should be untouched, and it any file permission has changed in /tmp,
then the nvidia package is suspect.



On 12/11/2012 11:01 PM, Will Rico wrote:
> Thanks for the tips guys!  I tried to recreate the problem and ran
> into a couple of new ones, lol...
>
> (1)  I couldn't figure out how to switch to the Gallium driver. After
> searching online to no avail, I tried switching the "Driver" line in
> xorg.conf to "gallium."  That didn't seem to work.  When I logged back
> in, the display was super low resolution and listed the driver as i915.
>
> (2)  I figured that removing the package for the nvidia driver would
> switch me back to Gallium.  It didn't.
>
> (3)  I reinstalled the nvidia driver.  Nowhere along the way did it
> change the permissions on my home directory.  However...
>
> (4)  When I got back into Cinnamon, I lost settings that you wouldn't
> expect I would have lost.  For example:
> a-  My language setting was lost
> b-  My panel settings were back to the default
> c-  My window settings (e.g. where the maximize/minimize/close buttons
> appear) were back to the default
> d-  I had my GMail account configured in Pidgin for GTalk and the
> account was gone.
> e-  Also, in Pidgin, I had disabled the lib-notify plug-in.  It was
> re-enabled.
> f-  When I started Firefox, it checked for plug-in compatability,
> which it only does the first time you run it after installing a new
> version, so it seems to have forgotten it had already done this
> g-  In Terminal, I had changed the colors.  These went back to the
> defaults.
> h-  When I look at my bash history, I don't see any of the apt-get
> commands I used for this experiment or the editing of the xorg.conf
> file, which leads me to believe I may be going crazy.
>
> I'm guessing some or all of the above settings were all stored in my
> home directory.  So like I said, I couldn't recreate the original
> problem, but I managed to create some new ones.
>
> Will
>
> On 12/11/2012 04:24 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 03:39:15PM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>>> On 12/11/2012 01:53 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
>>>> You could follow Bill's suggestion and pull apart the package and see
>>>> what it does.  Or you could just test it...  Being very careful not to
>>>> run anything else, log in to your system, change the driver back to
>>>> gallium.  Log out, and check your ownership and permissions.  Then log
>>>> in again, update it to nvidia again, and do your check again.
>>>>
>>> Possibly an easier way is to make sure everything is Kosher including
>>> your home directory permissions and ownership, then after you have
>>> verified, reinstall the package that you think caused the problems,
>>> then
>>> double check the ownership et. al. Then you can terminate your X
>>> session
>>> by logging out. You should be able to log in once again. Or if the
>>> problem is the same as before, then you can assume that the package you
>>> installed is the culprit.
>> Possibly easier, or possibly harder.  It's almost exactly what I
>> suggested, except it leaves out the step of returning the machine to
>> the state it was in prior to upgrading the driver.  If the problem is
>> caused by an interaction between those two, skipping that step will
>> obviously not trigger it...
>>
>


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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