-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
andy wrote:
Hi all
I have just installed Deb Etch onto my wife's computer, preserving her
pre-existing /home directory.
The installation was flawless until I went to go and login as her and am
being denied access at the gdm login screen. The messages refer to the
$HOME/.dmrc saying that it will be ignored, and that the $HOME directory
must be owned by the user and have 644 permissions and not writable by
other users. Click OK and then I get a dialog box informing me that my
session lasted less than 10 seconds. When I look at the
~/.xsession-errors file I am informed that it cannot create the per-user
gnome configuration directory .gnome2_private: permission denied.
In a word: help!
Did I do something wrong or did I skip out a step? When I installed my
Debian system I didn't try and preserve a pre-existing /home directory.
I am scared of fiddling just in case I toast her data (in which case,
I'll be toast!!).
Any ideas please?
Cheers
/A
Andy, don't despair. the data is still there.
Most likely it is either a userid problem or a permissions problem.
Log in from a tty (alt-F1 for example) as root.
Depending on which distro you ran before, it could be a userid problem.
Debian users begin at userid 1000 but not all do. Mandriva for example
begins with 500. If you're root and do a ls -la /home you should see
the owners, if it's a number and not a name, that's your clue. In that
case you need to change the owner of her /home directory to her with the
chown command. If the permissions are wrong, you can change them with
the chmod command.
Good luck.
Joe
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFF2JmviXBCVWpc5J4RAnwyAJ0X4LCZ8MYMerUcGUpaoceeW9cZQwCcCv1U
ZP1iHpShi97Hsm2BwKo+IRw=
=Re3d
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Joe