Hello,

it's all sorted now, but I had a very strange problem after installing. I installed from harddisk (the network install really didn't work), but afterwards gnome wouldn't start up. I removed lock files and anything that looked relevant, and noticed that some files were now owned by the other user of the system. I changed that, gnome started, then firefox wouldn't start, and I found out that in fact my whole home folder was owned by the other user. I changed it back with chown <me> -R /home/<me>, but I can't figure out what happened. Anyone have a clue?

derxen

Other user- who?
Did you create more than one user (root excluded) when installing?

I did. When I installed, I left the partition with the home dir on it as it was (with subdirs for me and the other user), and then defined the same two users.

derxen

What would have happened is this.

The system you set up originally with the existing home directory had a specific uid/gid set for the users' directories. When you installed a new distro, but left the home directory in place, when you created the new users, different uid/gid numbers were set for those users. That's why you needed to do the chown -R username:username /home/username to reset it back for the new install.

The starting uid/gid for users, versus standard system accounts, differs from one distro to another. Some start at 500, others start at 1000. Some could even be different from what I've listed as examples here.

So could it have something to do with the fact that I had installed the 2007.1 gnome live version first, then installed 2007.1 powerpack? Because I've done many installs of mandrake/iva keeping the /home dir intact, but this is the first time this happened.

I guess I'd better check the other user's files too, anyway.

Thanks Ian.

derxen

sure enough, I owned all his files.

derxen