problems at /home

[Kumar]

I'm yet another Windows user trying to switch over to the linux way of doing things. After doing some reading on these forums I decided to set up Kubuntu and give it a whirl. One of the things I thought that sounded like a good idea was to put /home on it's own partition.

My hda2 partition has all of my documents and photos and so contains a TON of stuff. During setup I chose to mount it as /home withouy reformatting it. Now the problem is, all the rest of the files on the partition I need to be able to get access to but they are all set to root ownership.

Is there a way to mass-change the ownership of these files or am I screwed? I have tried using kdesu konqueror to select the directories and setting ownership using the "apply changes to subfolders" but it always gives me an error.

When I change the owner for individual files it also gives me an error, but at least it does change the ownership. However, it's just not practical to change ownership for 6000+ files one at a time.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Kumar

[analyticalman]

Re: problems at /home

There may well be some quick way but I don't know it. As far as I can see you have set a /home partition which is formatted as FAT32 (or NTFS which probably makes it a little tougher). What I would do in your position is to reinstall kubuntu but put the whole installation on your hda1 partition. Then you will be able to mount your hda2 partition and see your files as normal. If hda2 is NTFS then write access may be a bit flaky but you'll certainly be able to read your files

[analyticalman]

Re: problems at /home

I forgot to put the standard warning/disclaimer. If these files on your hda2 partition are irrepaceable then you should back them up first before doing anything like this. In the situation you find yourself in that might be a bit difficult but should be possible using a live CD

[aysiu]

Re: problems at /home

I just want to clarify a few things:

1. Your /home partition and / partition are both in Linux formats, right? Ext3 or Reiserfs?

2. These files that are owned by root are in your /home folder? Or are they somewhere else?

Please give the answers to these questions, and I can tell you what you should do.

[Kumar]

Re: problems at /home

aysiu,
Yes, you are correct. My boot partition, sda1, is reisferfs mounted as / , hda2 is ext2 and was mounted as /home. So all of the files on the ext2 drive are on the /home partition. So all of the files outside of /home/username are owned by root and I can't write to them.

Sorry if I'm not being clear enough.

Here's my partition layout:

hda1 (NTFS)--> XP boot (grub mbr is on this drive)
hda2 (Ext2)--> /home
sda1 (reiserfs)--> /
sda2 (NTFS)--> video files

I need to be able to read/write the files on hda2 that are outside my /home/username directory, but I am having troubles setting permission or ownership, even using "kdesu konqueror".

Thanks,
Kumar

[kubicle]

Re: problems at /home

Files outside of /home/USERNAME ?
You have files in /home that you want to have accessible (and editable) for all users?

By default, /home is mounted as root and only the /home/USERNAME subdirectories are editable by (the owning) user

There are a few options:

1. You can edit their owner/group/permissions (see below)
2. You can edit their owner/group/permissions and move them under /home/USERNAME
3. You can edit their owner/group/permissions and move them under something like /home/allusers
(4. Theoretically you could mount /home with uid and gid other than root, but that's not a very good solution for multiple reasons :P)

Editing owner/group/permissions:
I've seen a few reports of trouble when trying to set owner/permissions under konqueror (an error message and the permissions of only one file changed if multiple selected...unfortunately I have not run across a solution)

You can use 'chmod' and 'chown' commands in console to make the changes (the -R option is useful if there are a lot of subdirectories)

See 'man chmod' and 'man chown' on how to use these...optionally you could search for a solution to the konqueror problem.

P.S. There should be a few system directories under /home (lost+found and .Trash comes to mind)...don't change those

[raphink]

Re: problems at /home

I need to be able to read/write the files on hda2 that are outside my /home/username directory, but I am having troubles setting permission or ownership, even using "kdesu konqueror".

Now wait a minute. You mean you'd like, as a simple user, to be able to modify other users' files?

This is not a bug, this is a feature. By default, users are not able to modify other users' files, and it's good this way I believe I don't recommend setting ownership to you in other users' directories...

If you have administration stuff to do on the whole system, do them as root (using sudo).

[kubicle]

Re: problems at /home

Now wait a minute. You mean you'd like, as a simple user, to be able to modify other users' files?

I might be wrong, but I think he has data files on /home (which is a separate partition) from a previous installation...and he can't access them as they are owned by root and he cannot 'mass-change' the owner/permissions of those files in konqueror.

I don't think he's trying to make system files editable for normal users...unless I misread the post completely (which has been known to happen )

[mchuskie]

Re: problems at /home

Kumar, can you post the contents of /etc/fstab?

[Kumar]

Re: problems at /home

Thanks to everyone who responded...we noobs really need the help. The problem seems to have been resolved!

Let me say that I do understand the reasoning behind limiting user access outside of the /home/user directory. In this case I am the only one who has physical access to this computer (it's in my home), so it's a bit of a non-issue for me.

The /home directory is on a completely separate drive and partition from the root partition, so I'm not giving anyone access to the other important system files either.

I just didn't understand the full ramifications of setting up my /home mount point this way. In all, I still think it was the best choice, because it did appear to save me some work upon reinstall.

Now to the solution. I pretty much decided that something fundemental was messed up with my installation. It didn't make sense that the sudo user wouldn't be able to set permissions.

So I decided to wipe and re-install. It seems to have done the trick and I was able to change permissions using kdesu konqueror without a hitch, even for all the directory sublevels of the directories I needed.

I'm still not sure what caused the original problem, but since it's a new install I have been installing a lot of stuff to things up to speed.

Thanks again,
Kumar