[Discuss] Linux Mint Cinnamon Home Permissions

[Will Rico]

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...
>>>>
>>
>>
>>
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