Error Saving Preferences?

Ernie,

Thanks for this advice but the problem is more than just mail.app.

It appears that I cannot make any changes to any preferences. For example I cannot change the desktop pic, or change the icons in the dock, or change the feeds I subscribe to using my news reader. I've checked and it uses a file in the preferences.

I'll troll the logs again and see if I can find something

I may have caught my white whale; I'm still checking to make sure it's not just a guppy fish that those dam kids down the road have painted white.

First thing is the ACL's against some of the folders in ~/Library are meant to be there. They are there to stop anyone, including the account holder, from deleting important well known directories. Like the Printers directory. From what I've seen they look like this (when using "ls -leh"):

drwx------+ 196 aaron staff 6.5K 8 Feb 20:44 Preferences
0: group:everyone deny delete


Which is fine, but my ~/Library directory also had this:

drwx------+ 196 aaron staff 6.5K 15 Jan 22:48 Preferences
0: group:everyone deny add file,delete,add_subdirectory,deletechild,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
1: group:everyone deny delete

That's a lot of bad mojo hanging around. So I removed the first entry in the ACL on Preferences using 2 (recently) live chickens and executing the following from ~/Library:

sudo chmod -a# 0 Preferences

The directory listing now looks like this:

drwx------+ 196 aaron staff 6.5K 8 Feb 20:53 Preferences
0: group:everyone deny delete

From this position I could do things that had previously been out of reach:
- Change my desktop picture
- Change mail preferences
- Change subscriptions in New Fire

I don't know why I did not see this ACL entry last time. Nor do I know what is creating it, so I keep an eye on it and see if it returns.

Let me know if this helps anyone.

Aaron

Aaron,

Hopefully this will help, but, wow, it is very nuts-and-bolts, isn't it?

Ernie

Otto, Yes its the terminal and it's not that tricky.

Remember that "~" is a directory is important, its a shortcut for your home directory. so "/Library" is different to "~/Library". You want to work on the later one.

If you see two ACL entries (the lines indented under the directory) then change the chmod command to have the number of the one to delete (mine was zero).

When you run the line that starts with sudo it will ask you to enter a password, this should be your password and it will only work if you are an admin. If your account was the first created on the machine then chances are you are one.

I'll check back incase you get stuck, but I'm London where they make the time so will be in sleepy land soon.

Aaron

Message was edited by: Aaron Morton

No problems it was really beginning to annoy me.

Aaron