Craig Mayhew's Blog » Linux Permissions

Greasemonkey scripts won’t update on Ubuntu

Craig Mayhew — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:11:00 +0000

The usual reason for not being able to update the scripts is that your permissions are wrong in your Firefox folder. Your Grease Monkey scripts will be in your firefox folder. The default place for this is (please substitute {username} for your actual Ubuntu user name):

cd /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts/

You need to make sure you are the owner of this folder. This command will make sure you are. Again please substitute whats inside the {} brackets.

chown -R {username}:{usergroup} /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts

If that still fails to fix the problem, then you also need to make sure you have write permissions on your firefox settings folder.

chmod -R 755 /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts

Ubuntu Error: The application “gnome-panel” attempted to change an aspect of your configuration that your system administrator or operating system vendor does not allow you to change

Craig Mayhew — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:31:24 +0000

Shortly after logging into Gnome I was getting the following error:

“The application “gnome-panel” attempted to change an aspect of your configuration that your system administrator or operating system vendor does not allow you to change. Some of the settings you have selected may not take effect, or may not be restored next time you use the application.”

Clicking the “details” button brings up the following message: “No database available to save your configuration: unable to store a value at key ‘/apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/expand’, as the configuration server has no writable databases.”

I had messed up my permissions in the .gconf directory that stores many of Gnome’s settings. In my case the execute permission was missing from the folder and all files within it so Gnome gave that error.

To fix this run the following commnd on your gconf directory. It will give your user read, write and execute permissions to the gconf folder and all files/folders within it which should solve the problem.

sudo chmod -R  u+rwx ~/.gconf

“Cannot find or run the base session script. Running Gnome in failsafe session instead.”

Craig Mayhew — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:00:28 +0000

After logging into my Ubuntu 9.04 machine I’m greeted with the following message “Cannot find or run the base session script. Running Gnome in failsafe session instead”. The reason for this was I had messed up my permissions and the following fixed it:

After logging in and recieving the errors message press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to drop back into command line. Then run the following:

Sudo chmod 755 /etc/gdm/Xsession

Ubuntu Error “sudo: /etc/sudoers is mode 0640, should be 0440″

Craig Mayhew — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 07:30:03 +0000

If for whatever reason you change the permissions on your sudoers file you will get a similar error to “sudo: /etc/sudoers is mode 0640, should be 0440″ whenever you try to run the sudo command. The problem is that because the permissions are wrong on the sudoers file, linux won’t let you run the sudo command!

To get around this press “Esc” at the grub loader screen when linux is booting and enter into the latest recovery mode. Then select the option that allows you to drop into a command line as root and type

chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers

Then reboot and your troubles should be solved!