Arch Linux

isolatedvirus

Member

Registered: 2008-01-29

Posts: 25

screwed system up with chmod and chown

Well the general jist of the story leading up to this, is cedega for some reason wouldnt let me run it as root, so i had to create a new user and give him sudo permissions. sudo didnt work, and i edited everything right with visudo. after about 4 hours of troubleshooting i just went into the sudoers file, removed the entry for root and replaced the name with a new users name. Sudo and su began to work. the next issue was startx wasnt working, i checked the forums and wiki and google for help, ultimately providing me two solutions.

chmod 1777 /tmp

and

chmod u+s /usr/bin/Xorg

the first one didnt work, and ive never used chmod before so i tried the second. well the x server started, but killed itself complaining about something. i had to do

chown -Rc username /home/username

to get it to work, because i copied the root directory to that location so i could use all of the files i once did before cedega required a user other than root. (is there a way to force it to stfu and use my root account?)

well i tried to run some commands as the user, and i was getting: Permission Denied so i remembered that commad chown u+s, so i ran it and applied it to every file on the computer. now my root account permissions are messed up, and both users get: Permission Denied when i try to use any command except chmod and chown. I believe that my system is messed up beyond repair..

What would you recommend i do to reinstall? And can i get assistance in setting up the user account so it has permissions? Should i copy everything that pacman saved in its cache to a thumbdrive and after i install a fresh copy, how do i get pacman to install everything on the thumbdrive (i cant remember the name of every package i installed)

Help is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance

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There are two kinds of light -- The glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures

Daenyth

Forum Fellow

From: Boston, MA

Registered: 2008-02-24

Posts: 1,244

Re: screwed system up with chmod and chown

Get the list of installed packages from pacman's database and -Sf every one of them. That should fix up all non-/home permissions.

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[git] | [AURpkgs] | [arch-games]

isolatedvirus

Member

Registered: 2008-01-29

Posts: 25

Re: screwed system up with chmod and chown

where would the pacman database be located, and im guessing -Sf is Sync force?

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There are two kinds of light -- The glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures

Daenyth

Forum Fellow

From: Boston, MA

Registered: 2008-02-24

Posts: 1,244

Re: screwed system up with chmod and chown

/var/lib/pacman/local; yes

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[git] | [AURpkgs] | [arch-games]

ghostHack

Member

From: Bristol UK

Registered: 2008-02-29

Posts: 261

Re: screwed system up with chmod and chown

pacman -Q will give you a list of currently installed packages and their version.  pacman -Qq gives you just the package name so you could do something like this

pacman -Sf $(pacman -Qq)

As for setting up a user the Beginners Guide in the Wiki has the following suggestions

Add a user and setup groups

You should not do your everyday work using the root account. It is more than poor practice; it is dangerous. Root is for administrative tasks. Instead, add a normal user account using:

adduser

While most default options are safe to use, you may want to add audio, optical, storage, video, and wheel when prompted for additional groups (separate them with a comma and no space) - especially if you are planning on having a full-featured desktop environment.

Groups and users thereof are defined in /etc/group.

They include:

    * audio - for tasks involving sound card and related software
    * floppy - for access to a floppy if applicable
    * lp - for managing printing tasks
    * optical - for managing tasks pertaining to the optical drive(s)
    * storage - for managing storage devices
    * video - for video tasks and 3d acceleration
    * wheel - for using sudo

See the Groups article to understand what groups you need to be a member of.

Check the man pages for usermod and gpasswd for more information.

isolatedvirus

Member

Registered: 2008-01-29

Posts: 25

Re: screwed system up with chmod and chown

i really appreciate the help, its because of users like you that made me switch back to arch from gentoo.
thanks again for all the help.

one last thing, would anyone recommend a book on linux administration? i really intend on never letting this happen again.

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There are two kinds of light -- The glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures