While trying to fix permissions for allowing a backup of my /usr directory, I accidentally messed up all of the permissions of all binaries/etc in that directory. I pretty much since then have just been fixing permissions as they come up by reinstalling the relevant packages with apt. I pretty much set the /usr folder (and all subfolders/contents) as a stopgap to be owned by root and have read/write permissions for root only, and read permissions for other users.
This has gone well for the most part, but I ran into a problem with the plasma authentication system that reinstalling kde plasma didn’t seem to fix. essentially, any time an application asks kde for system authentication, such as when the kde partition manager starts up, the popup crashes immediately with a red warning authentication failure please try again (starting the partition manager with root bypasses the authentication check, and starting it in terminal doesn’t reveal any information regarding the authenticator).
Another likely related instance is that I cannot login to the kde session from sleep, although logging in from the sddm session on boot still works perfectly fine ( same error as with the partition manager, giving authentication error).
I am running kubuntu 24.10, and I am hoping I can just find the binary with the incorrect permissions and fix them back to default if possible, although I might just have to reinstall kubuntu and all the applications I have, since the system works still aside from this permission error it shouldn’t be too bad but I just wanted to see if I could fix it for learning’s sake.
desktop environment is kde 6.1.5
I know that this is a fairly niche problem so I appreciate any help that can be sent my way.
Changed the title to a bit more detailed. Hope you don’t mind.
“Permissions issue” matched several other (more common) problems.
Seems unlikely those folks would find their help in this topic, so let’s not attract them.
Why did you think you needed to change permissions on the /usr directory to make a backup of files there? You reference using root, have you enabled a root user or are you using sudo? As a general rule, software such as partition managers require root/sudo permissions so that is not unusual. Have you checked the KDE System Settings in regard to login after sleep? You could, if you decide to reinstall, do so without formatting the partitions which should correct the permissions on the files in question and not cause loss of data.
I’ll be perfectly honest and say while you could in theory try and chase down which permissions changed and where and you could in theory check permissions for sudo, polkit, dbus etc. it would probably be quicker and safer to just backup all your important data and do a fresh install.
Depending on your hardware, you could be back up and running in 20 minutes or so.
Sorry for the late replies, I have a weird sleep schedule.
I was trying to enable kup to read the files there essentially and was too lazy to just change the specific files it was asking for permissions for (lesson learned).
I was using sudo to open the partition manager in terminal, but the usual pop-up for gaining root privileges would open and immediately crash.
I probably will just make a file of installed packages and just reinstall, it will be fairly easy since my home directory is on a different partition anyway.