Re: Permissions Question

["Thomas H. George" <tom@tomgeorge.info>]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 06:32:47PM +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote:
> "Thomas H. George" <tom@tomgeorge.info> wrote:
> 
> > I rebooted and gdm starts, opens icewm with aforementioned problems.
> > 
> > I can only stop gdm as root.
> > 
> > If I run startx as tom it starts gdm and opens icewm with the same
>                                    ^^^
> gdm too? That's strange ...
> 
> > problems.  If I run startx as root it opens gnome and if I try to
> > switch users to tom its a no-op, the desktop remains open with root
> > as the user.
> 
> I can't imagine where your problems come from, but I would try to
> create a new user with 'adduser testuser' (as root), shutdown gdm, login
> as that user and try startx and then some apps. If this works then
> compare ownership/permissions for homedir, dotfiles, ...
> 
> BTW, the box you were comparing permissions with, does it also run
> etch? How/when was the user 'tom' created. Do you have other users on
> this box?

Thanks, you put your finger on the problem Andrei.

	First, I added a new user (dummy), shutdown gdm, logged in as
	dummy and ran startx. The gnome desktop came up and dummy can
	launch and use iceape and openoffice.

	Second, as to how/when user tom was created, tom came from a
	previous existance.  I had a box which had been upgraded to Etch
	with a 1.4 GHz cpu which could not handle video capture and
	editing.  In addition, the hard drive was dying.  I bought a new
	motherboard (ASUS M2N4-SLI), an AMD64 cpu, 1 GB of memory, and a
	PCIE video card.  I had another old but OK 20 GB hard drive.
	Before shutting the old system down I burnt /home/tom to a cd.
	Then I switched out the hardware, did a netinst with the stock
	2.6.18-4-amd64 kernel.  When netinst succeded I copied the
	contents of the cd into /home.  Voila, tom resurrected.

	I don't immediately see why this should not have worked
	flawlessly.  I'll puzzel it out and, in the meantime, login as
	dummy.

Tom




> 
> Regards,
> Andrei
> -- 
> If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
> (Albert Einstein)