Knoppix saves the day

It was hardly as exciting as rescuing a hard drive with a pooched Master Boot Record, but I had occasion to use the Knoppix live CD to fix a minor problem with my Ubuntu PC.

I awoke Sunday, turned on the Dell Optiplex, and came back to a warning that the window manager session had lasted less than ten seconds. Not good. My default window manager is xfce, but trying to log in under Gnome resulted in exactly the same error.

Time to boot under Knoppix. The error dialog was kind enough to point me to the log file .xsession-errors, and the penultimate line of the file held the key:

xfce4-session: Unable to access file /home/jgb/.ICEauthority: Permission denied.

I became root and mounted the /home partition. .ICEauthority was listed thus:

-rw------- 1 root root 489 Nov 5 17:52 .ICEauthority

I backed that up and chmodded it to -rw-rw-r--. When I rebooted, the original error was repeated.

So, another boot into Knoppix. This time, I set the permissions to -rwxrwxrwx . This did the trick. I have since learned that the ownership should be changed from the root ID and group to my own.

Linux live CDs are an exciting development, and should be a part of any geek’s toolbox. Check the Wikipedia article on live CDs for more details.