[solved] Error message on booting ZenMini

[teddyred]

I am now suddenly getting the following error message when booting Zen:

________________________________________________________________

  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.
________________________________________________________________

I cannot locate the /home/dmrc file in order to change permissions.

[rubentje1991]

Look here and here:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=81455.0
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=83918.0

It goes about the .dmrc thing

[melodie]

Look here and here:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=81455.0
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=83918.0

It goes about the .dmrc thing

Hi,

Theses threads don't give the solution.
This error message is not directly linked to .dmrc file, but to the permissions on the user directory. To get rid of the message, the solution is very simple. You open a console, become root and go to /home. (su > passwd > cd /home)

There you type: "chmod 700 teddyred" (if teddyred is the name of your folder under /home, and if not, adapt it to your home directory name).

The message won't appear anymore.

The explanation : I don't have it. I had this message once, long ago, found the solution on the web, tried it and it has worked, as well as for all people I told it to ever since.

Fact : the home user directories should always be defaulted to 700 when created. The first user created at PCLinuxOS distributions is defaulted to 755 instead of 700, and the second and following are up to now, 700 (therefore correct). Textar had corrected it last year. It has appeared again.

[teddyred]

You surely are a 'Hero Member', melodie.  Your fix was simple and straight forward.
I no longer see the error message.
 
In checking permissions of /home folders, I do not see a number such as 700 for
the owner.  So if I want /home/teddyred/documents to be accessible from an
os on another partition, how should i set the permissions for that folder?

I'll modify this post to 'solved'.  Thanks so much for your help!

[melodie]

You surely are a 'Hero Member', melodie.  Your fix was simple and straight forward.
I no longer see the error message.

I learn as I go, and I already struggled with that one, as I told you.
  

In checking permissions of /home folders, I do not see a number such as 700 for
the owner.  So if I want /home/teddyred/documents to be accessible from an
os on another partition, how should i set the permissions for that folder?

The /home/teddyred is set to 700. The directories inside should be 755. (Most of them, but I noticed that PCLinuxOS fixes some of them to 700 as default) Then, as shown in the thread given by ongoto, there will be a directory setup as mount point to access the folder you want to share. Then all depends on the mount point permissions.

By the way, the easiest way I ever found to access a directory from another machine, is with the application "gigolo". Or if you use Kde, Konqueror used to work well for me.

Else : if you happen to setup a web server on the local machine, and a directory "public", or "public_html" inside your home directory, then, /home/teddyred will need to be setup to 711. (The .dmrc message does not come back either, in this case).

[teddyred]

melodie, I remember from those years of using PCLinuxOS with KDE3, that there were settings for permissions which allowed the user to change the criteria.  I can't seem to find those settings in Gnome.
But I'll tolerate it, cause I totally gave up on KDE.
And we'll probably be facing the same situation again when Gnome3 is released.
Too bad the supposed advancements often become regressions.

[melodie]

melodie, I remember from those years of using PCLinuxOS with KDE3, that there were settings for permissions which allowed the user to change the criteria.  I can't seem to find those settings in Gnome.
But I'll tolerate it, cause I totally gave up on KDE.
And we'll probably be facing the same situation again when Gnome3 is released.
Too bad the supposed advancements often become regressions.

Hi,

Permissions feature have to be understood as a whole. Desktop managers have more and more gui features to configure more and more things, and people either loose sight or just never come to learn the basics which allow them to understand what is under the layers.

ie : if you create a group, give wider rights to this group and make your own user belong to this group, then your user will have wide rights. But this is only one aspect of the right management.

There are new tools that allow having very precise permissions for all sorts of things : Policykit, and ConsoleKit. Before, there were only groups and users, and ACL.

For now, I stick with Lxde and Openbox standalone desktops : with PCManFM, gvfs, PolicyKit... and the way it is default configured in PCLinuxOS, I find it easy to go.