Ubuntu Productivity

I thought this would be valuable to some of you that are new to Ubuntu. Being rather new to this Ubuntu Linux thing myself, I have struggled to get the terminal commands for fixing the .dmrc permissions issue just right.

The problem

When logging into Ubuntu 8.04 I would see this error message. It explains that the permissions on my user’s hidden .dmrc file and home directory are wrong.

A photo of the .dmrc permissions error I was getting when logging into Ubuntu 8.04

The Solution

These two commands, to be run in the terminal, fixed the problem for me (many thanks to the Ubuntu forums)

chmod 700 /home/<yourusername>
chmod 644 /home/<yourusername>/.dmrc

Of course you must replace <yourusername> with your actual user name. Afterward executing these in your terminal reboot your system and the .dmrc error should be gone. Perhaps simply logging out and then back in would work, but I did not try this.

I always find screenshots helpful. Here are the two commands as I typed them in my terminal.

Fixing the Ubuntu .dmrc permissions error on login

The Explanation

For the curious: here is what the above commands are doing.

sudo, the first word in each command, is telling the computer to operate in super user mode. It stands for “super user do” and you can read more about it here at Wikipedia, or at sudo’s home page. Essentially it allows you to have temporary root access for the one command line it preceeds.

chmod is an abbreviation for “change mode”, which you can read about here at Wikipedia. It has the power to change permissions on files and/or folders. So in the commands above we use chmod to set the permissions of the .dmrc file and the home directory.

The numbers are octal notation, which you can read more about here at Wikipedia. They are easier to understand as 3 distinct numbers, as in 7, and 0, and 0, instead of a single 3 digit number, as in 700.

700 stands for:

• user permissions of 7. This gives full read and write access to your user.
• group permissions of 0. This gives no access to group.
• other permissions of 0. This gives any other user no access.

And 644 stands for

• user permissions of 6. Your user can read and write, but not execute the file.
• group permissions of 4. Group can read, but not write or execute the file.
• other permissions of 4. Other users can read, but not write or execute the file.