HELP! I may have killed my system

**gbarrier** · 01-31-2003, 07:25 AM

I was installing wine and ran winecheck. It returned 3 suspecious items. One of them was because user didn't have write permission to "/". The temporary file is /tmp so I thought I may need write permission to use wine. I then changed permissions by entering "chmod +x" in terminal as su. Nothing changed so I entered "chmod -x" and everything crashed. Now I cannot do anything other than log in as root at the prompt and every few seconds a box pops up with this:

Server Authorization directory (daemon/SerAuthDir) is set to /var/gdm but this does not exist. Please correct gdm configuration /etc/X11/gdm gdm.conf and restart gdm.

Someone please help!!!!!

Thanks in advance!

**Kernel_Killer** · 01-31-2003, 12:23 PM

Go back into tmp as root, and type 'chmod 755'. See what happens after that.

**mcdougrs** · 01-31-2003, 03:58 PM

So if you were in the /tmp directory when you did that... is chmod recursive and all inclusive? All inclusive meaning that is hits every file in each directory it goes into?

My thought is that you weren't in /tmp when you did the chmod but you were in / and it initially made everything executable but then you removed all executables by doing the chmod -x from / so you may need to figure out which files NEED to be executable and chmod them (individually?).

Not sure if the recursive thing is right or not so I may be WAY off on this

**gbarrier** · 02-01-2003, 01:11 AM

Thanks for your replies! I found that the problem sounded worse than it really was. I simply typed in 'chmod +x /' at the root prompt then rebooted. Everything works great now.

**Tyr_7BE** · 02-01-2003, 04:17 AM

just for the record, chmod isn't recursive unless you specify the -R option. Not sure why making your root partition executable made things better, but hey all's well that ends well. Just be on the lookout for funky permissions...this is seldom the type of thing that goes away just like that.

**mcdougrs** · 02-01-2003, 01:20 PM

[quote author=Tyr_7BE link=board=1;threadid=6234;start=0#59047 date=1044076644]
Not sure why making your root partition executable made things better, but hey all's well that ends well.
[/quote]
While I was reading the man page for chmod I found that the x permission on a directory makes it accessable... So I supose that the chmod -x made / unaccessable.

At least that is what I remember from reading the man page, me and my memory aren't the best of friends. It tries to screw me every chance it gets :P