X permissions or reinstall
by business_kid from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5188R)
You can help me out one of 2 ways.
Way 1:
A reinstall beckons. I have a recent iso, and did the usual thing
<# dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdc bs=1M> with a usb drive because the cdroms I wrote with it wouldn't boot, although it loop mounts just fine. I have the live usb, and runlevel 3 on the system. Can I wipe, reinstall, and carefully get my data back in small amounts, and is there a link to how to do it? I know there's some things in the a/ group you can't reinstall, but I have the live usb for that. It's the setup after I'd be keen on.
Way 2:
I've restored a backup after some messing, now finally booting OK, but I've been dogged by permissions errors every step of the way. My users got gid 1000 instead of gid 100 so everything was awol until I sorted that out. Some essential files (passwd, sudo, shadow stuff) were missing. I got in and reinstalled them, set passwords, and could log in. Nobody could sudo until I reset that. So everybody has runlevel 3.
Root's version of xfce4 is unspeakable (it always was, because I never bothered). Users have had a succession of errors
<Can't open /dev/tty0> <Can't open /dev/tty7> Loosening perms gets me in until a reboot if I do it for tty, tty0, & tty7.
That doesn't solve it, because it won't read /dev/input/* so I have no keyboard or mouse in X. I have to power off. In the logs it complains about hostname, but /bin/hostname is there, 127.0.0.1 is set to localhost in /etc/hosts and X & Xorg are set to 4755 in /usr/bin. I had struggles with ~/.serverauth.* ?& ~/.Xauthority, but I won there. It seems my last backups were not up to scratch. The last decent backup was 06-2019. The later ones are messed up in some way. I compared the groups user 'live' is in on the live usb, and the groups my users are in. My users are in more groups, and all that live is in, and they have less permissions.
Can anyone throw me a bone?
Way 1:
A reinstall beckons. I have a recent iso, and did the usual thing
<# dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdc bs=1M> with a usb drive because the cdroms I wrote with it wouldn't boot, although it loop mounts just fine. I have the live usb, and runlevel 3 on the system. Can I wipe, reinstall, and carefully get my data back in small amounts, and is there a link to how to do it? I know there's some things in the a/ group you can't reinstall, but I have the live usb for that. It's the setup after I'd be keen on.
Way 2:
I've restored a backup after some messing, now finally booting OK, but I've been dogged by permissions errors every step of the way. My users got gid 1000 instead of gid 100 so everything was awol until I sorted that out. Some essential files (passwd, sudo, shadow stuff) were missing. I got in and reinstalled them, set passwords, and could log in. Nobody could sudo until I reset that. So everybody has runlevel 3.
Root's version of xfce4 is unspeakable (it always was, because I never bothered). Users have had a succession of errors
<Can't open /dev/tty0> <Can't open /dev/tty7> Loosening perms gets me in until a reboot if I do it for tty, tty0, & tty7.
That doesn't solve it, because it won't read /dev/input/* so I have no keyboard or mouse in X. I have to power off. In the logs it complains about hostname, but /bin/hostname is there, 127.0.0.1 is set to localhost in /etc/hosts and X & Xorg are set to 4755 in /usr/bin. I had struggles with ~/.serverauth.* ?& ~/.Xauthority, but I won there. It seems my last backups were not up to scratch. The last decent backup was 06-2019. The later ones are messed up in some way. I compared the groups user 'live' is in on the live usb, and the groups my users are in. My users are in more groups, and all that live is in, and they have less permissions.
Can anyone throw me a bone?