Problems with my suse upgrade!

[lyecdevf]

I come to you because I am in need of advice. At this point I am trying to still save the situation but if you believe that it can not be done by a noob like me than I am going to ditch it and make a new install. What you want to keep in mind is the fact that I have been using this suse box for over a year and I have programs on it I installed from source.

Before I describe exactly the situation I am going to write about how this happened in fhe first place so that you can see what kind of an error I did and that hopefully some one else does not make the same sort of a mistake. The whole situation came into play when I chmoded a whole directory. Now I do not remember exactly which chmod I used but it was either 640 or 440. Now what happened is that all files in that directory became invisible to my nautilus browser. However, they were still there.

So last time I moved one of the file to my desktop using the shell. Now because this file had root permisions and once it got moved to my desktop it also made my desktop only read. Some how I soved this problem and I could write stuff to it but now I have a new problem. When I updated my suse box to 11.1 I can no longer boot in regular mode. I can boot in safe mode but what ever I do in safe mode does not affect the system as a whole. Some one told me that this could be an issue with gnome because I am using gnome as a graphical interface. I agree because I made some changes to it but what shoudl I do now?

 

[kmote]

You will most likely need to do a reinstall so I hope you have decent backups/can get backups. The reason you can't see the files in nautilus is because the files do not belong to either you or your group. Hopefully you can avoid reinstalling but I would like to know a couple of things first.
You chmoded a whole directory 1) what directory? 2) why?
It could - depending on the directory be as simple as re-chmoding the directory back to how it is supposed to be and chowning the file on your desktop, or it might not.
What I'm having difficulty understanding is how this happened. You must have done something like this;
su -
typed in your root password
chmod -R 440 /important_dir
That sounds quite odd to me - hence question 2

 

[lyecdevf]

I know it is all very confusing. In fact I do not really expect any one to bother with this. I just want to understand if this is sort of a point of no return where I just have to make a new install.

The whole thing began when I wanted to copy some files from the /var/snort/log directory. Now I figured I could just cmod the directory...I know a very dumb idea. I used either chmod 640 or chmod 440 command.

As I described later on I moved one of the files to the desktop after which the desktop decided to become read only. Than I ran a set of commands to fix that including this one:

umount /home/user/.gvfs && rm -r /home/user/.gvfs && ls -l /home/user|grep desktop

Now that aftected the gnome in some way. Because I set up the login manager to be gnome which I do not know why I did that the login manager now will not show. So that is what I fhink is the problem. The entire gnome seems to be corupted.

 

[kmote]

Yeah chmoding the directory was not the right thing to do. You could;
`chmod -R 644 /var/snort/log`
`chown [user] /home/[user]/Desktop/[file_name]` replacing [user] with your username and [file_name] with the name of the file you moved
I have no idea why you did this: (it's wrong anyway)
umount /home/user/.gvfs && rm -r /home/user/.gvfs && ls -l /home/user|grep desktop

 

[lyecdevf]

I have no idea why you did this: (it's wrong anyway)
umount /home/user/.gvfs && rm -r /home/user/.gvfs && ls -l /home/user|grep desktop

That was supposed to solve the desktop issue and I believe that it worked because I could write to my desktop after wards. Any way I am now in safe mode and I want to know how I could get back. If it is possible of course. I am still going to run this box for a while but eventually I am going to have to do some thing.