wine users - Apr 2009 - Wine and /home partition woes on Gentoo/amd64

I apologize if the question has been posed before, but I did not find any
similar posts by browsing or searching through the forums. Here it goes:

I have been using Gentoo Linux for a year now, and never have I had a problem I
couldn't solve. However, not long ago I bought a 1 TB hard disk which I
divided into 7 partitions: /boot, (swap), /, /var, /tmp, /usr and /home (yes,
that's FreeBSD influence right there). When I finished compilation of Wine,
I found I could no longer install DirectX. Age of Empires III, Black & White
II and Unreal Tournament III wouldn't install either - it wouldn't
budge. These are the errors DXSetup produces:

[Image: http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/8825/winetricks1.jpg ]

[Image: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/5236/winetricks.jpg ]

(the console only displays a 'status 43' message, I don't even know
what the hell that means)

I figure it has to have something to do with permissions, as somehow the program
can't write to my /home partition. I fiddled around with /etc/fstab and
octal permissions all day, to no avail. This is my current configuration:


Code:

/dev/sda1		/boot		ext2		noauto,noatime	1 2
/dev/sda2		none		swap		sw	0 0
/dev/sda4		/		ext4		noatime	0 1
/dev/sda5		/var		ext4		noatime	0 0
/dev/sda6		/tmp		ext4		noatime	0 0
/dev/sda7		/usr		ext4		noatime	0 0
/dev/sda8		/home	ext4		noatime,users,rw,exec	0 0
/dev/scd0		/mnt/cdrom	auto		noauto,ro	0 0
shm			/dev/shm	tmpfs		nodev,nosuid,noexec	0 0




As you can see, my /home partition and all its subdirectories have full
drwxrwxrwx (777) permission. Also, my /home/${user} folder is owned by
{user}:{user}.

Wine detects all partitions and drives perfectly:

[Image: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/8273/winetricks2.jpg ]

My Wine version is 1.1.20 (the problem persists after downgrading to stable), my
O/S is Gentoo 64-bit (on kernel 2.6.28-r5), I have compiled all emul-linux-x86
libraries, all partitions except for /boot are ext4.

Can anyone help me out? I'm going bald from stress here. Thanks in advance,

Itzamna

P.S.: I have done all the standard fix attempts, like deleting my ~/.wine
folder, reemerging wine, installing a different wine version, ..., so please
dream up a useful solution.

> I have been using Gentoo Linux for a year now,
Since early 2004 here on 30 to 50 machines (real or virtual hw)
between home and work.
> and never have I had a problem I couldn't solve. However, not long ago
I bought a 1 TB hard disk which I divided into 7 partitions: /boot, (swap), /,
/var, /tmp, /usr and /home (yes, that's FreeBSD influence right there). When
I finished compilation of Wine, I found I could no longer install DirectX. Age
of Empires III, Black & White II and Unreal Tournament III wouldn't
install either - it wouldn't budge. These are the errors DXSetup produces:
>
You should NEVER install DirectX under wine.

John

On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 10:00 -0500, Itzamna wrote:
> I figure it has to have something to do with permissions, as somehow
> the program can't write to my /home partition. I fiddled around
> with /etc/fstab and octal permissions all day, to no avail. This is my
> current configuration:
> 
Actually, you haven't posted the permissions for /home, which of course
would be the output from 'ls -l /home', but its possible you've
managed
to run out of room in a partition. The best way to see that is by
running:

	df -h

FWIW Fedora distros run this as part of the overnight logwatch report -
I'd imagine Gentoo does something similar. If you don't want to login as
root every day to read the system mail messages you can redirect the,m
to your usual mail account. Add the redirect by editing /etc/aliases and
then run 'newaliases' to update the aliases database. 'man
aliases'
describes the file format and how its used.


Martin

Thanks for the swift replies.

This is the output of df -h:


Code:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda4             510M  326M  158M  68% /
udev                   10M  196K  9.9M   2% /dev
/dev/sda5             4.0G  240M  3.6G   7% /var
/dev/sda6             510M   19M  466M   4% /tmp
/dev/sda7             9.9G  6.6G  2.9G  70% /usr
/dev/sda8             895G  168G  682G  20% /home
shm                   2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1             230G  162G   56G  75% /media/disk




None of my partitions seem full, so no problems there. The permissions of my
/home directory are all drwxrwxrwx or -rwxrwxrwx, I can't imagine that's
the problem either. I don't want to mount /usr with the exec option, as that
would be a huge security risk.

Is there anyone who has a clue?

I have traced the problem to gnome-volume-manager and HAL. Somehow HAL can't
play nice with /etc/fstab. When I have found the solution, I'll post it
here.

austin987 wrote:
> Where were they before? Is ~/games on a different partition?
> 
> -- 
> -Austin

The tilde stands for my home directory: /home/{user}, so ~/games stands for
/home/itzamna/games/. I don't know the exact mechanism by which this
workaround operates, but I think it has something to do with GVFS (Gnome's
virtual file system), as it has its own subset of permissions. I must say, my
Gentoo box sure is secure!