Ubuntu 10.10: Error: Could Not Update ICEauthority File

When I was booting a new Ubuntu 10.10 installation, I got an error message, "Could not update ICEauthority file /home/ray/.ICEauthority." I clicked through that, checked Update Manager, and rebooted. The ICEauthority error message was there again.

Seeking answers to this problem, I ran a search and tried the suggestion to type Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a text console. There, I hit Enter to get a login prompt. I logged in with my username and password, and this gave me a regular command prompt. I typed "sudo chown -R ray:ray .ICEauthority," where ray was my username. Then I typed "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart" to go back into the Gnome GUI. But the ICEauthority error message was still there. (From another post, it appears I could have just entered the chown command in Terminal, without Ctrl-Alt-F1.) People for whom this approach worked seemed to think that the problem was caused by opening a graphical (i.e., not purely text-based) program owned by root using sudo instead of gksudo. If that was relevant, it evidently meant I should have edited fstab by typing "gksudo gedit /etc/fstab." But was gedit a graphical program? Probably the better explanation was that my problem was caused by something else, and that this is why their solution didn't work for me.

Comments in another thread suggested that the problem might have been caused by an update, and also that the chown command (above) wouldn't work on an encrypted home partition. In a variation, I tried this:

sudo -i
chown ray:ray /home/ray/.ICEauthority
chmod 644 /home/ray/.ICEauthority\
exit

But this didn't do it either; the error was back when I rebooted. Somebody else said the problem had to do with changing passwords, and that was possibly relevant for me, so I went into System > Administration > Users and Groups and changed my user password, and also checked the box that said, "Don't ask for password on login."  But Ubuntu hung when I clicked OK; the circle icon (like the Windows hourglass, meaning "I'm working on it") stayed there for a couple of hours.  When I came back to the machine, I killed the dialog box and tried changing the password again, but it hung again.  I ran a search on that subproblem and tried the advice to kill that GUI approach and just type "sudo passwd [username]" in Terminal (my username was ray).  That worked.  So, back to the ICEauthority problem.  I rebooted, but no, the password fix was not the solution; the error message was still there.

Another suggestion was to make sure that the entire home directory belonged to the user (me).  That sounded like it might be on the money.  My impression was that moving around and copying this old /home partition could easily have screwed up the permissions.  So now, how to make sure I owned the whole /home directory?  In Nautilus (i.e., Places > Computer), I right-clicked on Home Folder > Properties > Permissions.  It said root (i.e., not ray) was the owner.  In Terminal, I typed "sudo nautilus" and, using the Tree (i.e., not Places) view (top of left panel), went to File System > home > ray > right-click Properties > Permissions and changed the permissions to me with full access.  I clicked on the "Apply Permissions to Enclosed Files" button, closed out of there, and rebooted.  Eureka!  That was the solution.  Done!

Ubuntu 10.04: Creating a Separate Home Partition

I was reinstalling Ubuntu 10.04. In the previous installations, I had gone with the default approach. In particular, I had kept the /home folder in the root ("/") partition. That meant some extra work to save and/or recreate my user settings. This time around, I decided to create a separate /home partition to store those settings. This post describes that effort.

As I looked into this idea, I noticed that some guides to this process were a bit vague about key details, and other guides admitted that it could be complicated and it didn't work for everyone.  So I decided the safest bet was to start with the Ubuntu Community Documentation webpage.  For the partitioning, I rebooted with an Ubuntu Live CD and went into System > Administration > GParted.  To figure out how big to make the partition, I mounted the partition containing my Ubuntu installation and then went into Applications > Accessories > Disk Usage Analyzer and drilled down until I got to my /home partition, which was under /media.  Its name was a long string of random numbers and letters, something like 4bas83ng-gabbdd-adbg-fb37abd.  (It's a unique identifier, different for each computer and device.)  The /home partition for me, with almost all of my data elsewhere, was only about 120MB.  I decided on 1GB, to be on the safe side, and called it "home."  When GParted was done, I shut it down, exited the Live CD, and rebooted Ubuntu normally (i.e., without the Live CD).  Then I went into Applications > Accessories > Terminal, and typed "sudo blkid" to find the UUID for the new 1GB partition.  Following the Community Documentation, I then followed the advice to make a backup of fstab by typing these two lines:

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
cmp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

(Note:  shell commands are case-sensitive, and punctuation is important.)  The second line was almost identical to the first, so I didn't actually retype it; I just hit the Up arrow key and then the Home key and edited the first few characters, and then hit Enter.  Now I was ready to edit fstab:  "sudo gedit /etc/fstab."  I added a line for the new home partition.

At about this time, I got distracted and strayed from the advice on the Community Documentation page at this point.  I ran into problems.  For reference purposes, the following section describes some error messages and other steps I took while trying to fix things.  After the following section, this post describes how I got back on track.

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DETOUR:  IF YOU HAVE FOLLOWED ME HERE, YOU ARE NOW LOST

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One of the first things that went wrong, aside from entering the wrong commands, was that I rebooted somewhere in the middle of the process, so Ubuntu read the fstab and assumed that my /home folder was on that new partition -- but I had not yet copied anything there, so the bootup froze.  So I had to reboot with the Live CD again, go into GParted, and delete that new home partition.  Then I rebooted without the CD, went back into GParted, recreated it, and did the copying step ("sudo rsync" etc., above).   Except that it didn't work.  I ran out of space.  Apparently I had not correctly calculated the necessary size of the new /home partition.  I went back into GParted and tried again.  This time I took the overkill approach:  30GB for /home.  (I had the extra space lying around, so why not?)  After a lot of fooling around with "sudo mkdir" this and "sudo umount" that, I did reach a point at which I had the right /dev/sd?? mounted at /media/home, and then the rsync command worked.  Then, as instructed, I renamed the old /home folder so that it wouldn't be detected as my /home folder:

cd /
sudo mv /home /old_home

I rebooted and sat back to see what would happen.  I got this on the initial Ubuntu reboot screen:

The disk drive for /home is not ready yet or not present
Continue to wait; or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery 

This called for some additional screwing around.  I wrote down what happened; but when I returned to this post after an absence of a few days, I observed that Blogger had decided that what I wrote was garbage, and deleted it.  Thanks, Blogger!  I believe the gist of it was that I had forgotten that the new home partition would have, of course, a new UUID.  So I had to change fstab to account for that.  I also wound up running the rsync command (above) from a Live CD boot, after mounting the root and /home partitions, in this format:

sudo rsync -axS --exclude='/*/.gvfs' /media/UBUNTU/home/. /media/home/.

where UBUNTU was the label of my Ubuntu (root) program partition.  After rsync ran successfully, this new home partition contained about 4GB of files.  Booting with an Ubuntu Live CD, I ran GParted and resized /home to 10GB.  I had to do a reboot or two to get past the error messages and complete this repartitioning process, as often happened with GParted.  I then tried to install Ubuntu, designating separate root ("/") and /home partitions.  I told the installer to format the root partition but not the home partition, where I was saving settings from the previous installation.  But while I was installing from the CD, the installation program disappeared.  This happened three times with two separate installation CDs.  But when I told the installer to just put everything in root (i.e., not to recognize a separate /home partition), it went ahead, and the installation process was complete.

So now I apparently had to get Ubuntu to recognize my old /home partition in place of the new one that it had just installed.  I started Nautilus (i.e., Ubuntu's File Browser, from the Places > Computer menu pick), right-clicked on home, and saw that Mount was an option, implying that it was not yet mounted.  So that meant that, whatever I was doing with a /home folder right now, I would be doing to the newly installed one.  I went into Applications > Accessories > Terminal and typed the same commands as above:

cd /
sudo mv /home /old_home

That parked the new /home folder under the name /old_home, where it would still exist just in case, but would not operate.  Now I needed to tell Ubuntu to mount my saved /home partition at boot.  I typed "sudo blkid" and used the mouse (with right-clicks) to copy the UUID for home.  I typed "sudo gedit /etc/fstab" but this gave me never-ending error messages.  Oops.  Apparently gedit needed /home.  I killed that Terminal session, started a new one, reversed the mv command shown above (i.e., "sudo mv /old_home /home"), and tried gedit again.  This time it worked.  I noticed that fstab didn't list most of my drives, so I went to my main installation post and executed its steps related to ntfs-config.  I checked /home in Nautilus again and verified that the separate home partition was still not mounted.  Now I hoped that "sudo mv /home /old_home would put the newly installed home partition out of the way, and that my old one would operate.  But on reboot, I got several errors, one after another:

Could not update ICEauthority file /home/ray/.ICEauthority

There is a problem with the configuration server.
(/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status 256)

Nautilus could not create the following required folders:  /home/ray/Desktop, /home/ray/.nautilus

The last one made me think that my /home partition was not being recognized.  But following the advice in a thread where they seemed to be discussing all of these messages, I didn't pursue that; instead, I rebooted with the Ubuntu alternative installation CD and chose the "Rescue a broken system" option and chose to "Execute a shell in the installer environment."  But this didn't seem to be the best route to a command-line option, so I bailed out.

(Note:  I also ran into a "udevadm" error during this process.  It did not appear to be due to this home partition effort, but there is a possibility that it was.)

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END OF DETOUR

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Eventually, I reinstalled Ubuntu, made my way back to the Community Documentation page, and tried again.  My entry in fstab now looked like this:

UUID=xxxxxxxx /media/home ext3 nodev,nosuid  0  2

I had already created /media/home and had done the rsync part from my previous installation (above), so now I tried these commands:

cd /
sudo mv /home /old_home
sudo mkdir -p /home/ray

where "ray" was my username.  Then I went back to fstab and changed it again to this:

UUID=xxxxxxxx /home ext3 nodev,nosuid  0  2 

and rebooted.  This time, rebooting went fine:  no error messages, and my desktop was back in its configured condition, with panels and buttons where I had put them before reinstalling.  Very nice.