HELP!!!!!

[Clay Weber]

On Sunday, November 21, 2010 07:57:09 pm Bill vance wrote:
> Howdy folks;
> 
> Having a few minor problems. I saw something yesterday that looked like it
> might work on the list, so I typed in:
> 
>    aptitrude update
>    aptitude safe-upgrade
> 
> thinking that it hjad been long enough that various bug fixes etc.,
> would have been
> implemented.  While that seems to be the case with a couple things, some
> things still didn't seem to want to install corectly.
> 
> Now however, kde is sending me numerous popup messages saying that various
> of its config files are not writable.  trying, "chmod a+rwxrwxrwx
> .kde/config/*", didn't work, and returned a message that said It was
> a, "readonly file system".
> 
> Apparently something did that to all my hard drives, so now I have to
> post from the Public Library.  The last time anything like this
> happened, I wound up losing a
> bunch of stuff for having to re-install the whole shebang.
> 
> So how do I cure my drives of this unasked for disease?
> 
> Bill

K(U)buntu's packages are built more with apt-get in mind, and sometimes 
aptitude safe-install can be too 'smart' and perhaps remove/not update some 
important things that are needed, causing a bad mix of the old and the new . 
Did you note anything in aptitude's output about what was going to be 
performed before running the task?

running 
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade 
may help fix that, followed by 
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop 
just to make sure.

Another thing to look at is not necessarily write permissions, but ownership. 
Not knowing the *exact* error message you got it can be hard to determine if 
it  is an ownership problem or a write-access problem, especially if there 
*is* a mis-match in KDE versions.

You can make sure all  your files and folders are owned by you:
sudo chown -Rv <username>:<username> /home/<username>

If you can get us the actual error message, that would be helpful.

clay