[Discuss] Linux Mint Cinnamon Home Permissions

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

Most crashes are caused by cockpit error.

On 12/13/2012 09:43 PM, Will Rico wrote:
> Well, I tracked down the culprit in this mystery and the trail pointed
> to dumb user, not bad video driver.
>
> Prior to installing Linux Mint, I had used Clonezilla to save an image
> of the home partition.  To be on the safe side, I immediately restored
> the image to a spare partition to see if a restore would be
> successful.  I didn't realize that this gave the spare partition (with
> the clone) the same UUID as the original home partition.  In fact,
> since I had done this step several days earlier, the extra partition
> was completely out of sight, out of mind.
>
> Installing the nVidia driver, led me to reboot.  When I rebooted, the
> cloned partition was mounted instead of the real home partition
> (unbeknownst to me).  All of a sudden my home partition had the wrong
> permissions (owned by a different user), which was the original
> problem I blamed on the nVidia package.
>
> I fixed the permissions, tinkered with the video drivers (trying to
> track down the issue), rebooted a couple times, and at some point was
> back in the real home partition.  A few changes later, another reboot,
> I was back in the cloned partition.
>
> The whole time, I didn't realize that I was mounting different home
> partitions.  I just noticed really bizarre stuff with my settings and
> permissions.
>
> Oh well.  I think there's another thread where I'm advocating trust
> for user intelligence ;-)
>
> Will
>
> On 12/12/2012 10:38 PM, Will Rico wrote:
>> Jerry, that's a good suggestion (to try this as "root").  I think
>> however, I'm going to wait until the weekend and try this with a
>> fresh install on a separate partition.  I'm a little gun shy about
>> reverting settings for a third time.
>>
>> Thanks for the good tips!
>> Will
>>
>> On 12/12/2012 07:37 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>>> 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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