Thank you. Yes I have done this as well, to no effect.
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Yes; it is very helpful that you premised this thread with what you did before the problem began. Many don't. Maybe they do not remember or do not think it was important.
Permissions are a critical thing and must be exercised with caution. Especially if the recursive flag (`-R) is used.
I saw above that you included a :users permission, as well... I wish I knew a "Restore all permissions to default" command that was simple. Sadly, we would really need to know each change you made - than trace it backward undoing each one in order to be thorough.
Your best bet is to reinstall Zorin OS. As daunting as that sounds, please first see this thread to see if you can make things less daunting.
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While I am not apposed to reinstalling if need be, that's really gonna be a last resort as this was incredibly tedious and tricky to get set up how i like it. I will try and undo a few more permissions first. Hopefully that helps.
Quick question (yeah..."quick"...sure lol): Lets go back to the beginning. When my emulators stopped being able to find my games, what should I actually do to fix that? FYI, dolphin was not affected. Of course I am aware that I was mounting the drives to a new place, but in Dolphin, I just had to point it to the new location. On the other emulators, that location won't even show up! Remember /media/tes/games? (in this case)
When I try to open it in, say, snes9x or kega fusion, it's not even in the list. Point of fact, even though it's in the /home directory, it doesn't show up in the emulators. (see screenshot)
As you can see in the above screenshot, the folder "games" shows up in file manager but not in the emulator search. This was what started my trip down misery lane, and caused the severe drinking problem that has haunted me since last Sunday.
I will tell you that I changed permissions for each of my hard drives, remounted them umpteen times till I finally mounted them all in /media/tes/drive-name. Now they all show up by NAME instead of the drive designation.
If I DO have to re-install, is there a way I can back up my apps and settings first? I downloaded "Back-in-time" but I don't really know how to use it lol.
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Yes:
You can save your entire ~/home directory if you want to.
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Hi there. Well, I just wanted to thank you (and everyone else as well!) for all your help. Try as I would, I had to reinstall. I just could not get it fixed.
I have my install now about 80% the way I had it. I have my various drives all mounting to /mnt/sdX (X being whichever drive).
My icons all work now, of course, I have backed up my repos, and I am currently backing up my system using Timeshift.
I am doing so now rather than AFTER I get it set up completely because I have already encountered an issue. This time I am asking for help BEFORE I screw it all up again.
With that, I am not sure if I should create a new thread or ask here. But I will ask anyway and please correct me if needed...
I am at the point where I have installed Steam and am trying to point it to my existing Steam Library which is located on another drive (sdd2 in this case).
When I did this before, I clicked the + button and the drive I needed was recognised immediately as one it could use. It was there, labelled correctly and I just had to click on it.
This time, that doesn't even happen. Instead, it opens a 'browse' window for me to search. But there is no "/mnt" to be found. If I try to point it to "/dev/sdd2" it returns an error about having to be mounted on a file-system with execute permissions. I saw that word "permissions" I just about threw my mouse at the TV after what I've one through with this thing already lol...
Can anyone tell me what I should be doing here? After I was making such wonderful progress this time, that really took the wind out of my sail.
Quick edit:
The issue which led to me screwing with permissions is also present. What I mean is when I am tryin to find my rom files on another hard drive, I have no access to said drives from within any of my emulators. Well, except Dolphin. That one seems to have no issues at all. The games drive shows up perfectly in the Dolphin game browser window. Mame64 is a little more janky, but I can at least point it to my roms, so I'll call that one 'fine' as well.
In the Disks app launchable from the App Menu, can you select the disks in question, then set them to automount:
Yes I have them all set to Auto mount already. It seems to persist correctly through reboots. Dolphin Emu and Mame can see them, but Steam and the rest of my emulators cannot. I even went through the file manager and clicked on one of the .bin files in my Sega ROMs folder and Kega Fusion launched immediately to run that game.
But that folder doesn't appear in my Kega Fusion file browser. Snes9x is the same. And Steam as well.
Do I have the drives mounting to the right place? Could it be a permission issue?
If they are mounting... it seems correct.
What about your File manager? What is your Default FM?
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Oh I don't know whatever Zorin comes with. I haven't changed it.
I do know that the games drive is NTFS and the steam drive is ext4.
I do remember when I screwed things up before with the permissions, I eventually changed one of the permissions that allowed Steam to see that drive so quickly. I just don't know what I did because I did two or three things at once and one of those other things screwed up my desktop icons.
Tomorrow when I am powered back up (I live offgrid and it's been dark and rainy all day here, so no charge) I will open the terminal and print out a list of the permissions for each drive. Maybe you can tell me if they look correct, or what I can change to allow Steam for example to execute files. Or even see the drive for that matter.
Is the package ntfs-3g installed?
sudo apt install ntfs-3g
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Morning! Ok, so, yeah. ntfs-3g was already installed.
As I mentioned , here is a screeny. I did 'ls -la' on its own (left) on the "Games" drive (middle), and on the "Steam" drive (right.
Can you tell me if the permissions are correct or what I should change them to and how?
Thank you very much again!
Incidentally, if anyone would be interested enough in this issue to TeamViewer it with me, I'm game for that, too lol
EDIT
K, I've made a smidge of progress here thanks to a member on the Steam forum having the same issue. Turned out, some else with Zorin had the exact same problem and had done exactly what I did.... installed Steam from Flathub. I uninstalled that, and reinstalled from the Zorin repo instead of flathub and now steam sees all my drives.
All that's left now are the issues with my other emulators. Could it be something similar? hmm
--Tes
I had just opened your Screenshot and was reading the lines when this edit popped up.
Yes... Flatpak packages are double sandboxed meaning that Snap or Flatpaks cannot see or interact with the system. Flatseal can be used to assign permissions on Flatpaks; though using the Standard APT .deb packages may be a lot easier.
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YES! Flatseal seems to do the trick! Man, I wish I knew about that 2 weeks ago! lol
As for the "standard apt .deb packages" can you elaborate a bit on that?
Thank you so much for all your help. This forum is by far the friendliest, most helpful forum I've found for Linux. I'm really glad I went with ZorinOS =)
Zorin OS is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.
The standard in Debian is APT - Advanced Package Tool. APT is the server - and it supplies .deb format packages. On your local computer, you use apt (all lowercase) which is the package manager for APT.
The vast majority of software you install is through APT and they are .deb package format.
Flatpak and Snap are alternative package management systems.
yeah makes sense. I've obviously had to use apt a fair bit, just for installs and updates, etc.
So like, how does one know what to type in?
I mean, the whole sudo apt install, apt update, apt get, I think I understand. But like, lets say I wanted to install Kega Fusion.
How would I know what to type in? 'Sudo apt install Kega Fusion' has a space in it. Does apt just know how to handle that?
I'm sorry if these are dumb questions. And I hope I'm not wasting too much of your time. I do look up a tonne of this stuff, but after a few months it kind of all mushes together
Each package in APT has a specific name. If you are unsure of the specific name, you can use the apt search function to correctly I.D. the package that you want.
In my terminal, I have an add-on for Z Shell (zsh) that does this for me. So if I type what I want, it offers the name suggestion based on what apt search shows as present in the repositories.
Many apps are Third- Party and are not in the Zorin or Ubuntu main repository. You must look those repositories up which will also yield the package names inevitably.
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That sounds very useful! Where would I find this add-on? How do you use it?
My own method is zsh with oh-my-zsh:
But there are others. Some like Fish:
I have found that oh-my-zsh contains a bit more than FISH does.
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Thank you once more lol 
I'll do some reading and go from there! You've been a great help!
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