$home/.dmrc Incorrect Permissions On Suse 10.0

Hi,
I am a newbie to Linux and SUSE, so I hope someone can enlighten me about the following:
I have three systems with SUSE 10.0 installed in dual-boot configurations with Windows XP, which I have been keeping more or less in sync. To that end a few days ago I downloaded the latest security patches via YaST, after which the following problem has occurred on one of my 3 systems, but not on the other 2:

Upon booting I get a message that my $home/.dmrc file has incorrect permissions and is being ignored. The file should be owned by user and have 644 permissions. I am then presented with a login box, which will not accept my userid, giving the same error message, but which will allow me to log in as Root. I can't login with my userid, but can cd to my home directory and I cannot see anything untoward therein. I am not aware of having changed any ownership or permissions, having merely updated the designated security patches for my systems.

Now the really weird thing about this to me is that I cannot find this .dmrc file in my home directory on any of my 3 systems (including the ones that aren't giving this error.) When I enter ls -al I can see other similar files such as .exrc and .kermrc, but not this one. I'm sorry if I'm missing something obvious here, but as I can't find the file I don't know how to change ownership or permissions.

Can someone explain how I can access this offending file from Root and also enlighten me as to what might be going on here? I am keen to learn so have held off from doing anything drastic like deleting or adding a new userid.

Thanks

have a look in /home/DustDog ( if thats your login name )
as root make sure hidden files are shown as it is a hidden file

andy

have a look in /home/DustDog ( if thats your login name )
as root make sure hidden files are shown as it is a hidden file

andy
[/b]

Hi Andy,
Sorry if I'm being dense here, but I thought that was what I was doing when I did a cd from root into my home directory (home/myuserid) and then did an ls -al command. As I said before this does not show this .dmrc file on any of my SUSE systems, including the 2 that aren't complaining about this file. The -a option does show similar hidden files such as .exrc on all 3 systems. That's what I find rather weird here.
Am I looking for this in the wrong place or am I using the wrong commands?
Can you enlighten me thanks?

Rob

sorry for disappearing, was just checking. just tried it under 10.0.& 10.1 .dmrc is there in both setups. maybe the problem is it is missing. try copying it from one pc to the other or creating it

andy

Upon booting I get a message that my $home/.dmrc file has incorrect permissions and is being ignored. The file should be owned by user and have 644 permissions. I am then presented with a login box, which will not accept my userid, giving the same error message[/b]

The only time we had problem in our house loggin into our SuSE PC, was when my wife could not loggin in as a regular user. Turns out she forgot to empty her trash, and filled up the hard drive. She got some strange messages, that she never wrote down. So my apologies if this is a red herring, but I assume you ensured that is not the case for you.

Hi Oldcpu,
Thanks for your input. Sorry, but I think it's a red herring as I don't have any space constraints on any of my systems at present. Thanks again though.

Hi Andy,
Thanks for your input so far, but I am afraid that I cannot copy this missing .dmrc file from either of my other systems because I can't find it on them, even though they are not complaining. I can only assume that I am therefore looking in the wrong places or am using the wrong commands as I suspected earlier. If this were not the case then I would expect these other systems to be complaining as well. You say that you've been able to display the file on your systems, so...

Can you list the commands you used to display the file via root please so that I can repeat them on my systems and confirm once and for all whether the file is missing or it's just me using the wrong commands? Thanks.
Sorry about this, but I am still a relative Linux newbie and am quite prepared to acknowledge that this may just be down to my lack of experience.
Thanks

If you're using KDE then click on the house icon near the left end of the Panel to open a Konqueror window. Under the 'View' menu, click the item 'Show hidden files'. You will now see several directories and files with names starting with '.' which are the hidden files. One of these should be .dmrc, and all it contains on my systems is

[Desktop]
Session=default

Eric

Hi Eric,
Thanks for your input. I am actually using Gnome rather than KDE, but I have been using it with the 'show hidden files' option checked. I've been looking at '/home/myuserid' on all three of my systems and all of them show hidden files such as .exrc, .muttrc, .kermrc, .bashrc etc, but none show this .dmrc file anywhere in that directory, nor as far as I can see, in any of its sub-directories. I've also used a terminal session in superuser mode and have done cd to 'home/myuserid' and then issued an 'ls -al' command from root against that directory. Again I see the other '.' hidden files, but not this .dmrc. This is the same across all 3 systems, although only one is having this problem, so I don't know how or why the others are not impacted.
As an experiment I've tried using my root login to create a .dmrc file in /home/myuserid directory as per the entries in your file. I then changed the file ownership to myuserid and just for the hell of it did a chmod 644 on this file as well. I then rebooted SUSE, and I am afraid it still gives me the same error message. Having subsequently logged in as root I can confirm that the .dmrc file I created is still there. So I am afraid it has not improved the situation. Please note that I only did this on the system that is having a problem and not on either of the other two systems.
If this gives you any other ideas, please feel free to let me know. Thanks

Rob

All,

I have been expierencing the same lately on my laptop runnig SUSE 10.1. Been running for a month or so now, never had an issue until recently when the error described in the previous posts started popping up....besides the annoying pop-up complaining about the permissions and ownership, the logon manager is also not reading the file....my .dmrc file states 'Session=kde' yet if I don't explicitly select to boot into kde for a particular session it will boot into gnome.

Per other threads on ubuntu forums and the like I ensured the file's ownership and properties were set correctly....not sure whats going on.....only thing changed recently was a couple of patch updates for kde.