Re: An x question, and a Permisions question

[Syrus Nemat-Nasser <syrus@ucsd.edu>]

iOn Fri, 8 Aug 1997, Kevin J Poorman wrote:

> I learned (hard way) not to use root as my normal user.
> 
> but when I try to start X as ender(my user) I get this error
> 
> xinit: unexpected error 2.
> 
> How can I fix this?

Not sure what your prob is based on the above description.

> now for the permisions question
> in trying to fix the above X question I found that almost my entire /usr
> directory is in the group root so I created a group called xprogs and
> added ender to that group I then move the x server binarys to the xprogs
> group but I still get the above error.

You don't have to do any of this.  There is no need for a user to be a
member of the group that owns a binary.  All that's needed is the 'x' in
the third column.  The permissions would all be right by default on a
Debian system.

> my question is this is it normal to have root own most of the /usr
> directory? plus is it a good idea to have a xprogs group for users who
> can run X? should I put all X binarys owned by that group?
> How can I chown them all at once ?

It is normal for root:root to be the permissions of said directory.  There
is a flag for using chown recursively, but you should not use it as you've
described above.  You probably have some permissions problem with you own
files in your /home/<user> directory, or some such thing.  If you've been
moving a lot of files around as root, perhaps you've generated some files
that have the wrong ownership.  Or, maybe it's something else, but the
default permissions would allow an ordinary user to execute 'startx' from
the console.


Syrus.

-- 

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Syrus Nemat-Nasser <syrus@ucsd.edu>    UCSD Physics Dept.



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