I have used redhat exclusively on my home machine for some years now. I just bought a dell inspiron 5100 and decided to try mandrake on it. 10-beta to be precise. It works great, but I'm a little confused about file permissions on mandrake.

On redhat I am used to going into a shell, typing commands etc. But on mdk it seems almost all directories are set execute only, meaning I can cd into them if I know where they are and execute files in them as usual, but they don't show up in ls and their contents isn't shown by locate.

Presumably there is a sound security reason for this, but it causes problems for me. I find that I can't run java unless root-the VM crashes at startup every time (when I think about it, this is probably the reason my java plugin crashes mozilla, too)

Could anyone perhaps explain the differences for me, and tell me how to set permissions so that java works?

ps. I have searched the forums, and it seems many people have had problems with the java plugin on mandrake. One poster said the problem was permission-based, but I couldn't translate that into a solution. changing the permissions of the plugin didn't cut it.)

The permissions thing with slocate may just be a database issue. I know this sounds simple, but did you run updatedb (as root) before you tried to locate something? One thing I have noticed about Mandrake is that any commands intended to be run as root are "not found" as a user. You have to "su" to root to get at them (like updatedb).
If you're having a java problem, perhaps you need merely to add it to your PATH. Here's a recommendation I have followed (from a Redhat mailing list, I believe) that has worked for me:

Add this to your .bashrc:

Where the x's are your java version #

If your java is in a different path type that in (but that's where they put it when I istalled their rpm). By the way, I decided to try their 1.5. beta and it runs fine. The plugin crashing may be caused by linking to the wrong one. Did you link to the one that was compiled with gcc3.x?

It's not my path, I've set up that, and anyway it shouldn't cause the VM to crash.

If you installed the Sun java as per their instructions, you would have found it in the same place as on Red Hat /usr/java/<java version>/bin/java . If it got installed there, I don't see why it won't work. Can you get it to run as root?

Yup,it runs fine as root. One significant difference between RH and MDK regarding the path you mentioned is that on mdk10beta at least, the direcories /usr and / have only execute permissions, contra read and execute on redhat. I thought I'd changed that, but it seems I haven't... either that or it's one of those settings that seem to mystically revert on this particular install :-)

I'll try changing the permissions to read-execute. I can't for the life of me see what the security risk in that would be, as we know what the directory structure looks like, setting execute and not read seems like security through obscurity to me.

If you run mandrake, I would like to know if your permissions are the same there (execute, no read).

As user I can read almost everything on my drive. Certain things I cannot read, like /etc/lilo.conf and some stuff in /proc but for the most part, I have read permissions for everything (not /root or a user's protected file on the old XP partition). When you installed, what security setting did you use? Perhaps if you opened up Mandrake Control Center and took a look at that, you might see that its set to "paraniod" or something to the effect.

Ah, you're right. Not paranoid, just "higher". I changed it to standard, perhaps now it'll stop resetting my permissions and stuff :-)

I'll see if I can get that java plugin to work now. Thanks for the help!

Its usually something small. Good luck.