Amarok doesn't let me delete files and when asked to organize, says the collection is not writable. What's wrong with my collection?



Note: Almost irrelevant(I believe), I have only one album in my collection, since this is a new netbook and I didn't copy my files yet

Perhaps your permissions are awry? Try:

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chown -R username folder/

replacing username and folder with the correct local terms.

Valorie

I have already tried

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chown -hR /home/sonay

that doesn't seem to work, even with sudo

It looks like amarok is not allowed to write in my home directory:

Try unchecking your /home, sonay, and everything but music under that. You don't really want to scan your entire ~/home, right?

Also, try again without the h and leading slash: chown -R home/sonay

Valorie

I'd check permissions in ~/.kde4/share/apps/amarok and

ls -la ~/.kde4/share/apps/|grep amarok

Also, do you use an external database?

You do not have user access to ~/home/, you only have user access to ~/home/yourname/.
Remember, Linux is a multiuser system, and Amarok runs in userspace, and should never be run with admin privileges.
With your configuration, Amarok tries to write to ~/home instead of ~/home/yourname/

Thank you all, the problem was due to selecting /home for the collection, as some of you guest. It should have been /home/sonay, however I don't understand why it is a problem for amarok to delete a file in /home/sonay/music directory since it has permissions to write there.

Yeah, I don't get that either. Either a bug or if you think of it kindly a quirk Perhaps it doesn't look into directories recursively.

On second thought, it is probably a feature

Mamarok wrote:You do not have user access to ~/home/, you only have user access to ~/home/yourname/.
Remember, Linux is a multiuser system, and Amarok runs in userspace, and should never be run with admin privileges.
With your configuration, Amarok tries to write to ~/home instead of ~/home/yourname/

I didn't run amarok with sudo privileges, I just used sudo to use "chown" command which wasn't necessary. I was just trying a long shot.

Thank you by the way, your suggestion worked

toad wrote:Yeah, I don't get that either. Either a bug or if you think of it kindly a quirk Perhaps it doesn't look into directories recursively.

On second thought, it is probably a feature

should I send a bug report?

It's just logical: the entry point to your collection was set to home/, where you don't have write access, hence the collection was not writable, regardless of the permissions of the subdirectories. Not a bug.

Mamarok wrote:It's just logical: the entry point to your collection was set to home/, where you don't have write access, hence the collection was not writable, regardless of the permissions of the subdirectories. Not a bug.

I disagree. If that were logical, then I shouldn't be able to choose a directory that I don't own in the first place. And secondly, every directory is a subdirectory of / and since no user except root is able to write the entry point, then no normal user could have ever written to any directory.

Or I don't get what you're meaning as I am not a native English speaker, then, please, excuse me.

Let's not split hairs here.

It sorts of make sense, but I wouldn't call it necessarily logical either. After all, collection info afaik is written into ~/.kde4/share/apps/amarok - so regardless of which directories you have asked amarok to trawl through (let's say for argument's sake you have read access to them) you should still be able to write to your collection.

But hey, at least you got it sorted. And yes, you are free to draw the devs attention to it by filing a bug. However, one reason they may have implemented this as it is, is because otherwise you'd only have to say your collection is at / so that amarok spends an age and a half to trawl through your entire file system in search of music. I can understand why that behaviour is to be discouraged.

I am not trying to get it upstream the way I wanted, in fact I have been using Amarok for more than a year and this is the first time I experienced such a thing and it didn't bug me at all. I am just trying to understand, since I am just a curious person. Anyway, it works.

Thanks to KDE developers for providing me such a beautiful and featureful player.