Permissions set to ??????

silverpig

Lifer
Jul 29, 2001
27,703
12
81
Ubuntu 7.10, Pentium-M based laptop with an ati 9700 mobility video card.

It was working fine all day today (or so the wife says), then I booted it up. Everything started off okay, got the splash screen etc, but when gdm was supposed to come up I got kicked to a console. The console worked fine but I couldn't get graphics at all. I tried restarting gdm several times using

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart/stop/start

and it always said [OK] but I still didn't have graphics. I rebooted a few times, rmmoded the fglrx module and modprobed it, still nothing.

I tried to manually start Xorg with

sudo Xorg

and got some error saying I didn't have permission to access /var/log/Xorg.0.log

I went to that directory and did:

ls -lah Xorg.0.log
Permission denied

sudo ls -lah Xorg.0.log
Permission denied

So I did an ls -lah in the directory to list all the files. Most came up fine, but Xorg.0.log looked like:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 308 2007-10-15 16:36 wvdialconf.log
??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? Xorg.0.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31K 2008-03-03 18:00 Xorg.0.log.old

My /var/log/gdm/:0.4.log file (or something like that anyways) was the same way.

I fixed the problem by doing:

cd /var
mv log log2
mkdir log
cp -R log2/* log/
(it gave me errors about those two files)
touch /var/log/gdm/:0.4.log
touch /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Rebooted and everything was fine.

So my question is: what happened?