Hah. I broke it.

**Shadda** · 01-28-2005, 05:46 AM

Okay, so I screwed over my system good. Linux, anyway.

Normally i'd just reinstall, but i'm getting sick of taking the easy way out, and reinstalling all my other packages.

I've spent a number of hours fiddling with it, trying to reverse what i did, but no luck. (I don't suppose there's some kind of configuration restore, is there?)

I accidently did chown -R shadda /, and really, really screwed everything up (I meant to do chown -R shadda ./)

When it first happened i couldn't login as root, I'd get

shadda@cervantes$# su
Sorry!

Now, after fiddling (such as chowning everything back to root), i get

shadda@cervantes$# su
Password: ...
Authentication Failure
Sorry!

I can login as root when i boot, but if i change to user shadda, and try to su or sudo, i get that error.

Any ideas?

**Harry Kuhman** · 01-28-2005, 05:57 AM

You're talking about Knoppix installed to hard disk, right? If so why did you post here rather than in the HDD install forum?

**Shadda** · 01-28-2005, 06:13 AM

whoops. Sorry, I just thought it fit under general support.

**Harry Kuhman** · 01-28-2005, 06:22 AM

If it involves a problem ralated to a hdd install, and this certainly seems to, then it has a much better chance of getting a good response there. I'll move it for you.

**Shadda** · 01-28-2005, 06:33 AM

Thanks.

And there is a new development.

I went ahead and tried to reinstall knoppix, but something extremely weird happened.

I've done this twice on this system already, without any problems whatsoever, but this time.....

I boot the livecd, and everything is fine until it tries to start x. It stalls for a while, and then tells me that it failed to load KDE, and says i have insufficient memory. Which is crazy, I have 256mb ram in this thing, and i've installed this fine (from KDE) twice, and loaded the disc countless times.

Anyone know what this is about?

**Harry Kuhman** · 01-28-2005, 06:41 AM

Just a guess, but the only thing that I can think of would be a swap file problem, since Knoppix will try to use a swap file if it finds one. Since you had a swap file from a previous HD install, you might try deleting the swap partition and recreating it.

**Shadda** · 01-28-2005, 06:52 AM

Nope. That didn't do it. And when i first installed knoppix, i didn't even have a swap disk.

Also, doing free -m tells me that i have 199mb free ram. This is crazy.