I installed Gnome 3 just to see what all the fuss is about and for the first hour or so it worked great. Now, however, I lost control of my Gnome settings.
For example, If I select “enable clicks” in Touchpad settings it doesn’t work and when I reopen settings the “tick” from hat box is gone. If I log out and log back in I lose all the favorites I put into the dock on the left hand side. In fact I lose all the favorites even if I simply restart the shell with “Alt-F2 r”
I can’t change wallpapers either, whatever I select in Settings is never applied, not even if I manually edit appropriate path to the picture in gconf-editor.
Okay, logged in as root and all the settings work there, means I somehow lost privileges for the settings as a normal user. How to get them back?
I looked into ,gconf, .gnome and .gnome2 folders in my home directory but all permissions are there set to me, not to root. I reinstalled gconf-editor but that made no difference. Besides, Settings application does not depend on gconf.
Maybe I ran some wallpaper changing script as root once and it changed the permission on some file somewhere but where?
I’ve already renamed dconf folder in .config, it was duly recreated but no luck.
I’ve also created a test user and its settings work fine, there’s something wrong in my Home directory, that’s for sure.
Now I’m thinking that if I’m logged in as myself and some files in my Home belong to root - how can I reset them? Especially if I don’t know what they are?
Should I open File Manager in Superuser mode from KDE, click on Home properties/permissions, set all to myself and apply to all?
Or maybe I should try delete all my gconf and gnome directories and see which ones refuse to be deleted?
> Now I’m thinking that if I’m logged in as myself and some files in my
> Home belong to root - how can I reset them? Especially if I don’t know
> what they are?
Something like this, with the needed changes:
#!/bin/bash
CAMINO=/data/vmware/
find $CAMINO -type f -exec chmod u+r+w,g+r+w,o-r-x-w '{}' \;
find $CAMINO -type d -exec chmod u+r+w+x,g+w+r+x+s,o-r-x-w '{}' \;
find $CAMINO -type f -exec chown cer:vmware '{}' \;
find $CAMINO -type d -exec chown cer:vmware '{}' \;
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
I don’t think any of the files in your homedir have been changed to “root”, since “root” writes in it’s own homedir, /root
What is an issue, is that you should never ever login on a desktop environment as root. I’m not going to explain here, there’s numerous threads on the forums.
What you can do, is logon to KDE, then remove the .dconf, the .gconf and the .gnome* folders, then logout and login on GNOME. That should give you a clean, default desktop AFAIK.
But, leave the use of root permissions for system administration.
On 2012-02-02 23:46, Knurpht wrote:
>
> I don’t think any of the files in your homedir have been changed to
> “root”, since “root” writes in it’s own homedir, /root
Not if use “su” instead of “su -”. It can also happen with sudo.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
I’ve deleted .gnome. gnome2. gconf (and .config/dconf) and got my settings back after restart, but, for some reason, not after simply logging out.
Will keep in mind not to login into desktop as root.
I think permissions on some files could have been changed by running some program from terminal in “su” mode - I could have started some wallpaper changing script that way, got confused with ./install in Readme, I thought it was necessary to run it as su, turned out it was not, but after installing the script I might have run it from the same console still in su mode.
Anyway, to get it back I deleted gnome related folders from Home. All the previous settings were gone, too, but it’s a small price to pay.
Thanks for the help, and for the bash script, too. I’m sure something like this will come in handy on more than one occasion.
One more question - what’s the difference between “su” and “su -” in this case? I understand it’s the different environment, but how would it prevent me from writing some files with root permissions in my home directory?
Also investigate gsettings