Home folder permission set up all wrong

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sharmila

Home folder permission set up all wrong

Post by sharmila »

Hi I set up LMDE Cinnamon on my brother's desktop. It worked fine in the first boot except for the following error message, saying $HOME/.dmrc could not be read.

when checking the permissions, this is what is seen. All the folders are owned by root and not by shyam, the user. The permissions were 777.

Code: Select all

shyam@shyamdesk ~ $ ls -lrth
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  3 19:19 Desktop
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  3 19:19 Downloads
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  3 19:19 Templates
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  3 19:19 Public
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  3 19:19 Documents
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  3 19:19 Music
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  3 19:19 Pictures
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  3 19:19 Videos
This means none of the programs can access or save the local settings of the user and the desktop env has become a mess.

I tried changing owner and permissions using chown and chmod but there is no effect.
sudo chown -R $USERNAME: $HOME
chmod 755 $HOME
chmod 644 $HOME/.dmrc
root is still the owner and permissions are still 777. But when I run chown and chmod, it does not give any error either. I even tried running the commands after switching to root using su . What should I do? This is the first time my bro (non-techie) is trying lmde and at a loss to explain to him why this occurs :(

PS: When I create a new file, it's owner is also root and permissions are 777. But the current user is shyam.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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altair4
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Re: Home folder permission set up all wrong

Post by altair4 »

I'm at a loss to explain why that's happening as well. Everything you are describing sounds like you installed the home directory to an NTFS partition.

Is that what was done?
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sharmila

Re: Home folder permission set up all wrong

Post by sharmila »

Hey thank you! That was the issue. I assumed it would be much easier for him to share files between his windows and linux installations
altair4
Level 20
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Posts: 11427
Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2009 10:27 am

Re: Home folder permission set up all wrong

Post by altair4 »

The way I have done this sort of thing is with a shared NTFS data partition. I then recreate the major home subfolders in that partition and use "bind"
to mount these folders back to the $HOME directory at boot:

Using Bind to Remount Part of a Partition: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=74321

Note: You won't be able to use the "upstart" method in that howto since Debian doesn't use upstart but the other methods should work.

You can also use a symlink at that point but either way it's just some or all of the subfolders not the entire home directory.
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