Permissions in Ubuntu 18.04

Question

I have made a big jump from my own clickidy HHD to a new SSD. I waited to install the new 18.04 until I switched out the drives in my laptop. Enough rambling...

The problem I'm having is ownership and permissions with everything. I can't rename files, I can't launch programs because they're untrusted and ownership shows "root" on what I'm use to seeing as "me." I've checked my account settings and it shows I am set as an administrator. Could it be because when I installed I selected OEM install instead of standard install? (Which kept failing by the way.) Are these the new characteristics of 18.04? How can I get back to being able to use my laptop as I use to, without having to open a terminal and sudo everything?

Emeka Augustine · Answer

The latest LTS version of Ubuntu 18.04 has a very good security system.

From your question, it is obvious that you had a permission problem. I had a similar problem sometime ago when I first tried to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04. To solve this problem, just create a directly where you want to place other files.

I will create a directory at /var/www directly for simplicity. Then type the following commands:

sudo mkdir /var/www/$YOUR_DIR_NAME
sudo -R chown $USER:$USER /var/www/$YOUR_DIR_NAME/$YOUR_FILE_NAME
sudo chmod 777 -R /var/www

Once you do this, you will have full access to the file. You will be able to access, read, write, delete and do pretty much anything to the file.

Don't forget to change the variables $YOUR_DIR_NAME, $USER and $YOUR_FILE_NAME respectively! This should always solve the problem for anyone with similar issues.

Permissions in Ubuntu 18.04

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