On Veetle, Linux Mint, and ICEauthority

Like most people, I use my computer for multimedia. Recently I’ve discovered a multi-platform program called Veetle. It’s a pretty good program, but I ran into an issue after having installed it on my system (currently running Linux Mint 11): while I was using it to stream video, my computer basically locked up – every running process continued working, but I had no control over it. Since I was watching a full-screen video, this was pretty unfortunate. After all, it often helps to be able to maneuver your windows when you’re in a bind. I also immediately noticed that I lost all sound control on my keyboard. I rebooted my computer, but when I tried to log in, I got an error telling me that my computer could not update /home/user/.ICEauthority, followed by another error message, which I’m assuming was related but of less importance.

I actually into this exact problem before on an older machine, but before I had the chance to investigate, the hard disk died (for unrelated reasons). Luckily, I recognized the error on my newer machine and put two and two together: both failures coincided with the installation of Veetle. Now, because I’m a nerd, I have two functioning and constantly active computers right next to each other, for just such an occasion! It may also be related to the fact that websites that stream media tend to be a bit iffy so I feel more secure not using my Windows machine while exploring them, but enough about that! I Googled (or Binged, assuming “Bong” or “Bung” isn’t the past tense) a solution.

The solution

As it turns out, other people have run into this same problem, and it’s been covered on the Ubuntu forums and elsewhere. Basically, I ran the Veetle script as root (D’oh!), and this royally boned everything. This post by mjcritchie at the ubuntu Forums (which follows the advice of tommcd at LinuxQuestions.org) explained what to do:

I have had the same problem twice, both times after updating (currently running 64bit Karmic).

Tried various solutions on the net, but this is the only one that worked for me:

Open a terminal and run:

Quote:

sudo chown -R user:user /home/user/.*

Where user is your user_name. This should change ownership of all the hidden files and directories in your home directory to: user:user, as they should be.

This comes courtesy of tommcd over at this post on LinuxQuestions.org

So there you have it. My machine currently works, and now I can get back to streaming media. At least until the next time I get too adventurous when installing things.