Linux Format forums

[bof]

This is one reason Linux will never catch on
I have been using Suse 10.1 with Gnome for about a week and am really getting into it. It's nice to think I might actually do without Bill for (some of) my jobs. I have put all my usable documents on Drive E of my WindowsXP setup and am using them from Suse. So far so good.....
I thought I would be clever by editing my User profile to make My Home point to my Windows E drive.
Next time I logged on all I got was a box saying "Your $HOME/dmrc file has incorrect permissions and is being ignored ...........File should be owned by user and have 644 permissions.
I could get no further and reinstalled Suse from scratch, losing all my emails and other settings.
On the reinstallation I disabled the Auto Login. Just being curious I again changed my home folder and got exactly the same result on logging in except I am now able to login to a Terminal window.
What on earth do I do now? Presumably there are some gobbledegook phrases I can type in to get it working again. Suggestions please gentlemen
Thanks goodness I still have Windows or I wouldn't be able to ask you chaps for help

_________________
Local shop built Desktop AMD core duo 4700 dual booting Vista and Ubuntu 7.10

[spottedcat]

Oh dear. Windows E: is that fat32 partition, isn't it? Fat32 - a native Windows filesystem that doesn't support *nix permissions. Permissions being one of the great strengths of Linux/Unix - so long as you don't..... Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear .

First up - we need to get that user profile pointing back to /home/yourusername (which is a file - directories are files in Linux - which has the correct PERMISSIONS). Others may have better ways of doing this, but if you log in as root (normally a verboten thing to do), can you get into Gnome? If you can then you should be able to go into YaST > Users and reset the yourusername profile back to the way it should be. Then (hopefully) you'll be able to login as yourself. The only way I know of accessing a shared fat32 partition from home easily in a GUI is to set up a symlink. That's a bit like a shortcut in Windblows. And it looks like a folder in home, except it has a little curved arrow on it - just lke a shortcut in Bill's favourite. I'll tell you how to do that - it's a piece of cake - if you can get your user profile sorted. First things first though......

[Flea]

Hi Bof,

Setting your home directory to a Windows partition is probably not a good idea, The reason Suse complained about your permissions is because you need write access to your home folder. I'm not even sure if NTFS/FAT32 supports the same type of permissions that your linux filesystem does.

To restore your original home dir type

[bof]

[spottedcat]

You were almost right! It's 'cd /'. Remember that Linux (and Unix) distinguishes between upper and lower case and that Linux/Unix/MAC/alldecentOSs use / as a directory separator and not \ .

I think you have to log in as root before you can use the line Flea gave you. This from info usermod:

[Steogede]

[bof]

Thanks for your input Steogede. The only way I can get Suse to even look at me is by using the Failsafe terminal mode. When I type YAST into the root terminal it says "yast: command not found"
As I hinted earlier, I want to drive Linux, not learn learn how to adjust the gaps on the piston rings. I've done my share of stripping out a layshaft on a frosty morning
I think I'll reinstall Suse a third time and make sure I don't look under the bonnet again.

Thanks for your interest, I'm off to bed now )

Edit: Query for SC: shall I stick with Gnome or give KDE a try on my next installation
_________________
Local shop built Desktop AMD core duo 4700 dual booting Vista and Ubuntu 7.10

[spottedcat]

[bof]

Oh dear, here we go again!
SC, I have downloaded and burnt the Ubuntu disc and booted straight into the live version with no problems.
I am very impressed with my first sight of it and have fired up Firefox so I can tell you about it here.
However ---- back to square one and I'm lifting the bonnet again ---- I need to access the data on my Fat32 E drive.
Looking in the Places/Computer/ tab I can see lots of drives and am not sure which of them is my E drive. Double clicking the one marked "System" shows up the system files ok but all the other drives say "Unable to mount the selected volume"
Going by my previous experience I open up filesystem/etc/fstab and see this:-
unionfs / unionfs rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/hdc7 swap swap defaults 0 0

Am I right in thinking that I will have to properly install Ubuntu to sort this out? If so, do I need to do anything to get rid of my two previous installations of Suse?
_________________
Local shop built Desktop AMD core duo 4700 dual booting Vista and Ubuntu 7.10

[spottedcat]

bof, it's now Saturday morning and I'm even more deeply mystified. I've just deliberately broken a SuSE 10.1 installation the way you did, and then successfully repaired it the way I originally suggested in my first post of this thread. This is what I did:

Changed my home directory in user management in YaST from /home/myname to /mnt/sda2 (which is the mountpoint for a fat32 partition on my desktop multiboot). Logged out. Logged in and got the error you saw. Clicked OK and the GUI promptly crashed back to the login screen. I then logged in as root (username='root', password=root password), and I was back in Gnome in a trice. Went into YaST, reverted my home directory to what it should be, logged out and logged in successfully as myself. Everything all now tickety-boo. Very mystifying.

Gnome v KDE To add to my afterthought of last night, why not try Mepis as well. Like Ubuntu Dapper it comes as a double-purpose live/install CD. But unlike Ubuntu it uses KDE as its desktop. They are both a little quirky in the way they setup the two desktops, but it gives you an idea without having to install anything. You won't do any harm to your machine and present installations by running them live. (Unless you do something silly like reformatting your hard disk from gparted/qtparted. ) Mepis was on the LXF79 coverdisk, or if you haven't got that you can find a download mirror at this url. You need to look for the iso for SimplyMepis 3.4-3. One or two of those mirrors don't respond and they all seem to be pretty slow unfortunately.

Happy hunting. Above all, don't give up.

[spottedcat]

We seem to have posted simultaneously. But, whoa, slow down. Why do you want to access your fat32 data from Linux. Can you get to it from Windows? Two things. Remind me which partition (number that is) of your hard disk your fat32/E: is and I'll tell you how to navigate there. The rubbish on the desktop is still a little flaky IMHO, and I hope it will be alittle better for the final release.

Second thing: Mepis has an easier way of accessing the other partitions. If you download the ISO, post back and I'll tell you how to find it. (And how to log in. )

Edit: Just noticed your last questions. No you don't have to install Ubuntu, or Mepis. You can do a lot live. No you don't have to uninstall your SuSE installations. (Two??) You just let the new installation overwrite the old one.

[bof]

[bof]

Hello Spottedcat.
Just to let you know I have downloaded and installed HD Ubuntu on the HD, and very pretty it looks.
The bootup screen shows I still have Suse 10.1 available. I'll start a new thread tomorrow and invite your opinion as to removing Suse and recovering some disk space.
_________________
Local shop built Desktop AMD core duo 4700 dual booting Vista and Ubuntu 7.10

[GMorgan]

If you want to access a FAT32 partition then create a folder within your home directory then open a terminal then enter the following (assuming Ubuntu here)
#sudo gedit /etc/fstab

then in gedit enter the following line at the bottom of the file

/dev/hdxy /home/bof/winhdde vfat defaults 0 0

Where bof is replaced with your username, winhdde is the folder you created and hdxy refers to your HDD partition for FAT32.

The HDD naming convention for Linux works as follows.

x refers to the actual HDD with a being the first HDD b being the second and generally c and d are optical drives. So if your FAT32 partition is on the master drive on IDE1 enter a for x.

y refers to the partition on HDD x. 1-4 are primary partitions 5- are logical partitions. When you've identified where your partition is drop the values in and away you go.

//edit - you may have to reboot to get it working. It can be mounted without rebooting but a reboot will give us a better idea if its working normally which is what you want.//

[spottedcat]

Actually, one shouldn't need to do that in Dapper - or at least I don't have to in my installation. Here's my Dapper /etc/fstab: