Hello,

I'm installing KDE SC/Gentoo on a friend's computer, which was running Windows till now. He's sharing the computer with his girlfriend and they're used to having 2 sessions, one for each, so they don't get their stuff mixed up, plus one folder where anyone can drop anything to be edited or overwritten by anyone else. On Windows it works just fine as both users are Administrators, but I can't emulate the same behaviour on Linux. I've tried chmod-ing a directory to 0777, but if someone creates a subdirectory, its chmod will be the default 0644 (if I remember correctly.)

I've tried putting both users into the same group, changed the owner group of the directory to that group then chmoded it with g+w but individual users still can't seem to write to that dir.

Code: Select all

# as root
groupadd shared
usermod -a -G shared user1
usermod -a -G shared user2
mkdir shareddir
chown nobody:shared shareddir

I'm kind of running out of ideas here, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

You probably want to change the default umask as well. Probably in /etc/profile or /etc/login.defs, or even in ~/.bashrc.

umask 0027 might be a good one (if my calculations of the proper value is right). It should give the owner full control, group r/w, others none.

Right click on any folder you want to share, scroll down to Properties and select Permissions. Make the changes and select Apply changes to subfolders. Then create a link from that folder to the other user's desktop and any files in that folder will appear to be on the other user's desktop as well.

My husband and I have some shared directories (actually on a server, but that doesn't affect the principles). What I did was make the folder for the top of the shared directory (plus sub-folders, as I had put in some shared files from the start) owned anne:users, with read-write permissions for owner and group - all this can be done from dolphin or konqueror. While in the gui, go into the Advanced page on permissions, and set the GID flag. This will ensure that which ever of you writes a file it will always have 'users' as its group - and since 'users' is rw, you should have no problems.