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I'm the kind of guy who likes to make things easy for himself, and I believe I went too far. There was a single directory right under the / directory, but I cannot recall which one at the time, and I switched all of the permissions for this directory to my user ID. Now that I have done this my computer has been running slow and and acting unusual.

Gnome is the biggest problem. As soon as I login, the system starts reporting errors and seemingly blaming these problems on gnome. Is there a simple method to repair this problem without re-installing ubuntu?

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  • Change back the user permissions?
    – Xweque
    Jul 2, 2014 at 19:49
  • I guess i could do that but im thinking theres different owners to the folders than just root Ill try it
    – user299895
    Jul 2, 2014 at 19:55
  • Heres the error gnome settings daemon crashed with SIGABRT in_g_assertion...... It doesnt show the rest
    – user299895
    Jul 2, 2014 at 20:14
  • Linux/Unix was not designed as a single user system like Windows started out as. You cannot own everything. You should not own everything. The very fact that you can't change/edit something has probably protected you several times in the past. It protects the system from errant programs and viruses (Yes, linux viruses exist!). YOUR files are in your home directory. The fact that you have a sudo command, or know a root password is what gives you the temporary permission to change something.
    – lornix
    Jul 8, 2014 at 23:06

2 Answers 2

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Based on the information you've given, I think a full re-install/restore data from backup is in order.

This is based on:

  • You hosed the permissions of an important directory (off /).

  • You don't know which one.

  • There is no practical way of restoring permissions that have been hosed on a recursive directory tree.

  • You may think you could just set everything outside your home directory back to owner root:root but you can't - many daemons run as their own user account and need write access to files in, say, /var somewhere.

  • You may think you could just make the permissions as permissive as possible (eg chmod 777 everything) but that would leave you with a horrible insecure system and some software will refuse to run with insecure permissions. It'd still be messy.

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  • Ok thankyou i need to set up a backup image next time
    – user299895
    Jul 13, 2014 at 5:28
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GNOME needs the correct permissions for these folders in order to run. I believe that GNOME has a system user account which it uses, and a quick check of the passwd file confirms this. Set the permissions back as soon as you can - you might need to log into another computer with this system and possibly copy the permissions over for each directory. Don't do this kind of thing again, if you need to modify these files use sudo or su.

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  • Thanks for the help, im gonna do a reinstall, but to do that with limited internet.....
    – user299895
    Jul 13, 2014 at 5:30

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