My permissions seem to be borked, how do I fix this?

I made a complete backup of the system with "rsync -aAXv", and set up my encryption. After restoring everything, and booting up and trying to login, openbox didn't want to start, and "startx" didn't work either. After a bit of testing I noticed that I didn't have the permissions to create the necessary temporary files and therefore x and openbox didn't start.
I just ran "ls -l" on /home/john/.Xresources
"-rw------- 1 john john 54 Sep 6 11:10 /home/john/.Xauthority"
When I try to run openbox, I get this:
"Openbox-Message: Unable to make directory '/home/john/.cache/openbox': Permission denied
Openbox-Message: Unable to make directory "/home/john/.cache/openbox/sessions": Permission denied
Openbox-Message: Failed to open the display from the DISPLAY environment variable."
Where does the problem come from?
Can using pcmanfm to copy files (ctrl-c + ctrl-v) cause this? I first had to copy the backup from my external harddrive (ext4) to my laptop (btrfs) and then back before I restored the files on my desktop pc.
Last edited by Nordic89 (2014-09-07 10:10:01)

When copying files/folders with root privilages, root becomes the owner of these files/folders. It may be that some of the directories and files you copied are owned by the root user/group and not user/group john. What you could do is change the permissions of all files in the directory recursively so that all files are owned by user/group john. This can be done using 'chown'. Login as root user or if you have administrative privilages, use 'sudo' followed by the below command to change the permissions of all the files in the directory "john" recursively:
# chown -R john:john /home/john
What this does is recursively (-R) change the user:group (ownership) of all directories and its content to john:john, thus allowing that user full acces to all files in that directory.
To learn more about chown and user permissions:
$ man chown
Arch Wiki: File permissions and attributes
Last edited by rgb-one (2014-09-13 17:10:48)

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My permissions seem to be borked, how do I fix this?

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