Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2006 1:15 pm Post subject: NeoOffice for new accounts
Hello!
I've been using NeoOffice 2.0 since the PowerPC alpha EAP started, and have enjoyed every minute using it, with absolutely no problems whatsoever.
Tonight I added an account on my machine for a new, non-admin, user. I added NeoOffice to the dock and tried it out. Everything worked fine, except it was not able to save documents. More precisely, it *created* the documents, but it was not able to write to them (they remained at 0 bytes), and gave an error message (rather more an assertion) to that effect. I reinstalled NeoOffice several times in various different ways (from different accounts, without patches/language pack,...), but nothing worked.
In the end, it turned out to be something very simple: the new account had no access to the /tmp folder. Manually setting the permissions of /tmp to 777 solved all problems.
If access to /tmp is so vital, maybe it would be a good idea to have the installer check this (and remedy if necessary) to make sure NeoOffice will have access from all accounts on the machine?
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2006 1:34 pm Post subject:
I believe this problem used to occur with OOo as well using tmpnam() but I hadn't seen it in a while. I just did a fresh install of 10.4.6 on my laptop here, and for sure the /tmp folder is only writeable by root.
It's interesting, however, since I haven't experienced any problems. Neo 2 is creating files in /tmp for its interprocess communication pipe and other things, but I haven't noticed any problems. While the symbolic link for "/tmp" doesn't have world permissions, my "/private/tmp" directory to which it links has world read/write permissions. I'm not sure if that's how fresh installs should look or not. I'd file this as a bug in BZ as a reminder of something to look at so in sal we can fall-back on the user-specific temp directory if /tmp isn't writable.
What you had was a slightly modified system. /tmp should always be a softlink to /private/tmp and /private/tmp should always be readable and writable by all.
If this is not the case, then your system has been messed with either while someone was logged in as root or by some application's (or Apple's system update) installer.
/tmp is actually not only required by NeoOffice, but many system functions like printing.
This is one thing that repairing permissions should fix (I think it might even recreate they symlink, but I'm not sure).
I once had Apple's Backup.app fail on Disk 14 of 20 because it had somehow fubared the permissions on /tmp or /private/tmp after Disk 13 (of course, I had already cancelled the backup before I realized it was permissions...).
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
I didn't try much on the new account before trying NeoOffice, so I can't comment on whether other things were broken or not. I'll assume there were.
I didn't realize /tmp had to be a symlink. On my machine (10.4.3 installation upgraded gradually to 10.4.6 through the system update feature) it was a regular directory. Maybe "creating" /tmp was a side effect of something else I tried to do, who knows.
The directory /private/tmp was world accessible, as it should be apparently.
Anyway I changed /tmp (back) into a symlink and everything is still working...
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