[PLUG] (st_uid=1000)

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Tue Dec 9 03:56:10 UTC 2008


After upgrading to Intrepid Virtualbox will not launch. From the
command line I get:

jjj at Devil7:~$ virtualbox
VirtualBox: supR3HardenedVerifyDir: Cannot trust the directory
"/usr/lib/virtualbox": not owned by root (st_uid=1000)

After a few moments of puzzlement it suddenly dawned on me - this is a
residual problem from the day when I took ownership of the entire /usr
folder. Hey, I'm the user, right? So they're my files, right? Evidently
the new version of Vitualbox in Intrepid has some security thing going
on that requires the above folder to be owned by root.

So fine, I'll make root the owner of the folder. I did

sudo chown root:root /usr/lib/virtualbox

And the command indeed made root the owner of the folder. But I still
get the same error message as above.

I should add that I have Virtualbox on my desktop as well, and after
upgrading it to Intrepid Virtualbox still works fine. But I did not
take ownership of the /usr folder on the desktop. So that has to be the
source of the problem on the laptop.

Looking at the desktop, the /usr/lib/virtualbox permissions are
rwxr-xr-x, which I think translates to 755. I chmod'd the folder to
that on the laptop, but 755 set it to rwsr-xr-x, and I still get the
same error message when I try to launch Virtualbox. I can't figure out
what the "s" is in there or how to change it to "x." (Set user ID?)
I've googled almost to the end of the internet and Google seems to have
run out of answers. Or maybe Google is just sick of me.

Oh, and I also reinstalled Virtualbox from Synaptic, but no joy.



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