xwmconfig leads to permission problems + no startx

[Simpatico]

When xwmconfig closes, I'm getting the following message:

rm: cannot remove '/home/username/.xinitrc-backup': Permission denied
mv: cannot move '/home/username/.xinitrc/' to '/home/username/.xinitrc-backup': Permission denied

startx then doesn't start X.

As root, I have changed the permissions on both of those files to 0755 and thought that would fix it, but I'm still getting the same message. The user owns both of these files, and I'm executing wmconfig and startx as this user.

What am I missing?

[Simpatico]

If you do it right, re-installation is an opportunity - to change partitions around and generally improve the system.

[bidi]

I had the same exact issue and could not understand why! I'm going to look more into it when I get a chance, but all I did was remove the user and user dir, then recreated the user and the dir. Works now, but I still don't understand why I can't work with the files after using xwmconfig.

A thought that just came to mind might be that xwmconfig is messing with the UID environment variable. Might be worth checking out.

[Simpatico]

Thanks for the response, bidi.

I never did learn the reason. I re-installed and immediately felt stupid for not doing so sooner. Ah, well - I have a bit more experience with chown and chmod, anyway. I will look into the UID env variable especially if this ever happens again.

If you learn what is doing, this, though, please at least give me a clue.