Help please!! chown mess up

[ascotilla]

Hi all

I've been dealing with linux for a couple of months now. I have to do quite specific things, so I didn't read the whole manual. I have the intel composer installed, as it's the reason why I moved to linux.

I had many problems with the compilation of a program, so I decided to install a debugger, but I couldn't for having problems with the permissions. I read in a forum that the command sudo chown can be used to modify the permissions, and I used it to modify all the permissions (sudo chown -hR ascotilla /). Now I've learned that it was a stupid thing, as I'm not able to enter in linux anymore. I get this error:

could not update ICE authority file /var/lib/gdm/ .ICE authority

All these things are really driving me crazy, and I can't get any help from anyone right now. Is there any chance of solve the problem without loosing everything I have installed before?

Thanks in advance!

[Dapper Dan]

Are you able to use a command prompt? If so, do:

ls -l /

Are the "owner(s)" someone other than root root?

[ascotilla]

I don't know how, I'm not being able to enter Fedora, just get the error of the ICE authority, which I can't even close because the mouse doesn't work

[devils casper]

Press Alt+Ctrl+F3. It will switch to tty3 ( Command Line ). Does it allow you to login there? Execute command suggest by Dapper Dan there.

[ascotilla]

Thanks devils casper, but I had already tried the Alt+Ctrl+F1, and it seems that it is completely blocked. The mouse doesn't work, nor the Ctrl+Alt+Del, so I need to restart it using the on/off key and change to the windows OS which is also installed in the computer to come to the forum again (it's hard to be a newbie, I messed it up seriously!..;-P).

[lomcevak]

He said Alt+Ctrl+F3, not F1. The other option would be to boot in what's called single user mode. To do this:

o Press 'I' as soon as it starts booting.
o Select the 'e' option
o Move down one line to highlight the 'kernel' line
o Select the 'e' option
o Add ' single' at the end of the line, note the space before 'single'
o Press Return
o Select the 'b' option to boot

It'll boot to the command line. Then you can try the 'ls -l /'

To later shutdown the command is:

shutdown -h now

[ascotilla]

Hi lomcevak,

Thank you for that, I could finally enter and get the information, which mainly says that I have permissions in everything but three folders, on which the root is the only one one who has them, which are:

>drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 3600 2011-03-28 20h15 dev
>dr-xr-xr-x 106 root root 0 2011-03-28 21h15 proc
>drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 0 2011-03-28 21h15 sys

In all the rest it says "ascotilla root" instead of "root root".

As I read in other forums, that's bad news, and probably I'll need to reinstall fedora. Will that mean that I'll loose everything from it? I have some programs installed and some files that I'll like to recover..is that possible?

Thank you for everything...really

[lomcevak]

It looks like the best approach to your problem will be to reinstall Fedora and then reinstall the programs. If there are some files that you want to save before reinstall then you'd have to use some removable media like a pen drive. You'd have to initialize it, mount it, copy the files to it, and then umount it.

[Dapper Dan]

ascotilla, I'd try chroot into your Fedora install and see if I could change ownership with:

chown -R root:root /

But you'd need to change ownership on your home directory after that:

chown -R ascotilla:users /home/ascotilla

Any live CD should do when doing chroot.

[ascotilla]

Thanks to both.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to boot the live CD for some reason. Unsing the chroot didn't work either (I could change the permissions, but still didn't work).
After one whole day of trying everything I'm going to ask the ICT service to reinstall fedora and all the programs again.

Thank you anyway, I didn't expect so many answers!