NEW Problem WITH UBUNTU STARTUP

[Derek Broughton]

Graham Todd wrote:

> On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:23:02 +0530
> ashwin1711 <ashwin1711 at gmail.com> uttered these words:
> 
>> > CHOWN: invalid group: 'syslog:adm'
>> > ---its 16 line---
>> > starting kernel log daemon
>> > chown: invalid group:'klog:klog'
>> > ---it is written 2 times---
>> > after 15 min it run and final msg come like
>> > user's $home/.dmrc file is being ignored.This prevents the default
>> > session and language from being saved.file should be owned by user
>> > and have 644 permissions.User's $Home directory must be owned by
>> > user and not writable by other users
> [snipped]

Typically, this sort of error happens when one tries to run a GUI app with 
"sudo".  So you just fix the ownership & permissions, and never do that 
again...  In this particular case, I rather suspect you've copied files from 
another user, or deleted and recreated a user, and ended up with the files 
owned by the wrong user ID.

# sudo chown -R graham:graham /home/graham

(assuming, of course, that "graham" is your user ID).

> I haven't had the trouble the OP outlines, but I have had this message
> pop up after entering my user name and password at the start.

I'd be a little surprised if it happened anywhere else, as that looks like a 
common file for gdm/kdm/xdm, specifying your default desktop (and possibly 
other things).
> 
> I am using a variant of Ubuntu (yes, I know I shouldn't but its so much
> easier) called "Ultimate Edition Linux 2.3"

Why not?  It's always possible that the "variant" changes things enough that 
this list would be unable to help you, but that's no reason not to use such 
a variant :-)

> and its immediately obvious
> why this message appears.  I don't know if the version of Ubuntu copied
> across ("Jaunty") suffer from sloppy programming or whatever, but when
> you right click on the home folder in nautilus, you immediately see
> that both "group" and "others" have permission to execute the home
> directory. 

That's not an issue.  'x' permission merely means that you can traverse a 
directory (useful, for instance when user "charlie" wants to give "fred" 
access to one of his subfolders, named "fred" - so he sets the group 
ownership of /home/charlie/fred to "fred", and gives all group permissions 
to "fred", and he gives "x" permission to "world" on /home/charlie.  
Otherwise fred would never be able to even get to the directory he has 
access to.

Giving 'x' permission on a directory is unrelated to 'x' permission on a 
file.  In this case, you could give 755 permissions to .dmrc - it wouldn't 
matter as it isn't executable anyway.

> 644 permissions give only the user executable permissions,

Actually, it doesn't _even_ give the user execute permission.

> but both "groups" and "others" to read and write but not execute the
> file.

No, they can _read_, but not write.
> 
> This is a good link on permissions in Linux:
> 
> http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/usersguide/linux_ugfilesp.html

> The message still appears, and if I click on the OK button it
> disappears without any apparent problem.  The next install I make of
> Ubuntu (Karmic?) will with the sources.list from my current system will
> show me if this causes any conflicts.

The message is clear - you can't write to the file.  So you fix the 
_ownership_, so that you can, and next time it won't need to tell you.
-- 
derek