2007 and permissions (?)

[Guest westli]

I have been a user of mdk/mdv since V5.0 and I have tweaked my system into oblivion plenty of times. So, while not an expert, I'm fairly comfortable with the distro and have been able to overcome most problems I have had. But this one has me stumped.

 

I started by doing a Live install into a clean / directory and then adding some desired packages. I ended up with every directory except /home being Root:Root 755, and I wasn't able to change them. I share music, video, and Openoffice.org files with WinXP on a couple of /mnt directories and I couldn't edit any files. CHMOD run as root would do nothing, not even an error message. CHOWN run as root would respond telling me I don't have permissions to do that. Adding a rule under MCC>Security>Fine tune security permissions... had no effect.

 

So I downloaded the ISOs and reinstalled. MD5sums checked out on all of them. I picked my packages carefully, but the system seemed to install an awful lot of stuff anyway. Exactly the same issues.

 

So I burned the CDROMs at a slower speed. I don't think this made any difference, but the third install went a little bit differently. I chose to install groups of packages this time. It appeared to install just as much as the previous time. I got the same permissions but was able to change them. For simplicities sake, I just made /mnt 777. I could make it more secure later. That worked. I thought I was in until I tried adding and/or removing packages via MCC. I got an error message (and I forgot what it was, same of all of them, though) whenever I tried to do something. RPMdrake, maybe?

 

So, I am back at 2006, but still wanting to upgrade (with a clean install, of course).

 

Maybe I was getting what I was supposed to be getting and doing the permissions thing all wrong. Any ideas?